I finished both the Polar Lights Ecto 1 kit and the Delorean today!
The Ecto 1 was 98% finished yesterday- today I just put on the new metal whip antenna
The most time consuming part of this was (as usual) the Bare Metal Foil stage. I think I spent 5 hours on it yesterday... ugh. Not perfect, but I think I'm getting better at it
I built a proton pack rack for the rear compartment before I realized that it is very hard to see into that area, even if you look through the front windows... I suppose it's kind of a good thing that the interior is hard to see, as it disguises my shoddy brush work- one piece bucket interior + bad brush + Ethan trying to paint by hand = gloppy finish... Behold
(seated inside is the really neat little Spider-man Minimate that I picked up yesterday... They happen to fit well in this scale of model)
The Delorean was started today (Sunday) at 1 PM, and finished about 10 hours later (with frequent breaks and interruptions). I'm not going to paint the fender cables until I get some better brushes- see the Ecto 1 interior for that reason
A couple of really odd things happened with the pre-steel-chromed body... First, removing the masking used to paint the bumpers/trim left sticky residue all over the body. I was using the 3m blue low tack masking tape- it has NEVER left residue before.
So, I took all of that gunk off with some alcohol and Q-tips. Then I hit the body with a coat of Krylon satin clear coat- the pre-chromed body is the right steel color, but a little too shiny to look completely right. This is the second weird thing- a few spots on the right side of the body seemed to lose their plating under the clear coat... If the Krylon stuff does dissolve chroming (which I had no idea it did), it still doesnt explain why it happened to just a few spots.
You can see in this pic where I tried to match the chroming to some steel paint that I had, and was only partially successful.
Overall, these were excellent kits! Both could use a few more decals- instruments for the Delorean and labels for the roof equipment for Ecto 1. They're very well engineered though- there are only a couple of easily overcome fit problems on each, which made them really fun to build.
Ethan
The Ecto 1 was 98% finished yesterday- today I just put on the new metal whip antenna
The most time consuming part of this was (as usual) the Bare Metal Foil stage. I think I spent 5 hours on it yesterday... ugh. Not perfect, but I think I'm getting better at it
I built a proton pack rack for the rear compartment before I realized that it is very hard to see into that area, even if you look through the front windows... I suppose it's kind of a good thing that the interior is hard to see, as it disguises my shoddy brush work- one piece bucket interior + bad brush + Ethan trying to paint by hand = gloppy finish... Behold
The Delorean was started today (Sunday) at 1 PM, and finished about 10 hours later (with frequent breaks and interruptions). I'm not going to paint the fender cables until I get some better brushes- see the Ecto 1 interior for that reason
A couple of really odd things happened with the pre-steel-chromed body... First, removing the masking used to paint the bumpers/trim left sticky residue all over the body. I was using the 3m blue low tack masking tape- it has NEVER left residue before.
So, I took all of that gunk off with some alcohol and Q-tips. Then I hit the body with a coat of Krylon satin clear coat- the pre-chromed body is the right steel color, but a little too shiny to look completely right. This is the second weird thing- a few spots on the right side of the body seemed to lose their plating under the clear coat... If the Krylon stuff does dissolve chroming (which I had no idea it did), it still doesnt explain why it happened to just a few spots.
You can see in this pic where I tried to match the chroming to some steel paint that I had, and was only partially successful.
Overall, these were excellent kits! Both could use a few more decals- instruments for the Delorean and labels for the roof equipment for Ecto 1. They're very well engineered though- there are only a couple of easily overcome fit problems on each, which made them really fun to build.
Ethan
