The 'Secret' prototype.....

[zenrat]

A LOT! 

Maybe twice as large? A Merlin is a 27 litre engine, almost four times the capacity of the 7 litre V12 I'm using in this model, plus it has a socking great supercharger hanging on the back.



That's the wreckage of my 'Wild Thing' drag racing van, similar in size to Fred Zenrat's twin engined Chevy, and it has an Airfix 1/24 Spitfire Merlin engine in the back. It runs via an ex-boat V-drive transmission and the exhausts go out through the roof almost vertically. 

I'll re-build it one day................

Plane engined car GB?
Bloody ridiculous GB?

I'll make a note for next years vote.

[PR19_Kit]

 

[McColm]

A LOT! 

Maybe twice as large? A Merlin is a 27 litre engine, almost four times the capacity of the 7 litre V12 I'm using in this model, plus it has a socking great supercharger hanging on the back.



That's the wreckage of my 'Wild Thing' drag racing van, similar in size to Fred Zenrat's twin engined Chevy, and it has an Airfix 1/24 Spitfire Merlin engine in the back. It runs via an ex-boat V-drive transmission and the exhausts go out through the roof almost vertically. 

I'll re-build it one day................

Plane engined car GB?
Bloody ridiculous GB?

I'll make a note for next years vote.

Yes that was one of my future builds to put the RR Merlin engine in a Dodge Viper 

[PR19_Kit]

Now I'm back in my 'country home' I've resumed work on the 'Secret Prototype'.

Even MORE of the floor has been hacked away now, but some new floor panels have been glued in place now that I've got the rear suspension assembled. The front end, complete with subframe and hubs and suspension struts, has been glued in place too. To my amazement it lines up a treat so that front wheels are in the centre of the wheelarches!  To my mind this is always important with car models, unless the real thing has them grossly un-centred.

I've hacked away the front seats from the interior, leaving a VAST hole to be filled. But as this is a test car it will have proper bucket seats with 4 point harnesses and the passenger's seat will face backwards so they can attend to the instruments. We really did do that back in the 60s, and some firms still do it today. Here's the interior so far.



If I've gone really crazy by the end of the build I may make an instrument package and a UV recorder to sit in the back seat too. 

A long way to go yet mind.

[PR19_Kit]

I don't recall ever having to PSR the inside of a car model's engine compartment before, but I have now. 

Because the entire front suspension of the Secret Prototype has been changed the longitudinal underfame members have all been replaced forward of the firewall and will have to match the body shell eventually, so a lot of 'cutting and shutting' of the donor chassis has taken place.

The front end is all now glued in place, complete with steering rack, brake discs, hubs and suspension struts, but the donor underfarme was moulded with open tops to the box sections, and I couldn't live with that. I've boxed them in with 10 thou strips and then PSR'd the edges as in the RW they wouldn't have been sharp as they were pressings.



Here you can see one side of the new underframe PSR'd and the other side raw, without the boxed in panels.




Here's the complete underside view, showing how well the new front suspension fits in with the original underfame. Amazingly they're EXACTLY the same section and width apart.  I've also started boxing in the rear wheel arches and chassis too.

[PR19_Kit]

I never thought I'd be going back to body line drafting at this time of my life, but here I am doing it, albeit in 1:24 scale, and taxing my memory to think back to 1962!

I've been drawing up the panels for the dummy body that will go over the top of the 'Secret Prototype' today, and it's not looking too bad, but pretty ugly, as these things usually are.

Makes a change from cutting and filing odd shaped pieces of styrene anyway. 

[zenrat]

Ah-ha!  I've just worked out which kit you sourced the chassis and interior from.
Don't worry,  my lips are sealed.
 

And knowing that, it's become even more intriguing.

[PR19_Kit]

Curses, I've been rumbled. 

Fred got it dead right too, some excellent detective work there. 

Here's a deliberately blurred pic of the dummy body, as far as I've got anyway.

[jcf]

The earlier of Frank Lloyd Wright's car designs.   

[PR19_Kit]

A certain angular similarity there, yes. 

[zenrat]

As far as car designers go, Frank Lloyd Wright makes a good architect...

[PR19_Kit]

.....and I make a good bridge designer.......... 

The construction of the dummy body shell is complete now, but it'll need a bit of PSR and gap filling before it's worth showing on here. That won't give away the source vehicle though as it looks NOTHING like the 'inner car', more like a fugitive from a 'Mad Max' movie. 

[PR19_Kit]

The construction of the dummy body shell is complete now,

To quote Donald Sutherland in 'Kellye's Heroes', 'No it ain't....................'

Having assembled the dummy shell over the proper body, I now find it won't fit down low enough because the single curvature dummy roof won't lie properly over the double curvature real roof. A predictable problem when I was building the dummy shell from flat sheet of course, but even the hair dryer treatment won't curve the dummy roof enough to make it fit.

So the dummy shell now has the world's largest sunroof, as I cut most of it away as I'll have to build it up in layers to allow some extra room in the centre.

If it was easy everyone would be doing I suppose...............

[PR19_Kit]

Now it's done, enough to fit properly anyway. It's not perfect, but these camo bodies never were anyway.





As you can see, it's quite deliberately ugly, and looks nothing like the real car that lives underneath it, but you'll have to trust me on that as you ain't seeing the real one for some time yet. 

It's all made from one A4 sheet of black 10 thou styrene, and I almost used all of it, but there are a couple of scraps left over. 

[PR19_Kit]

PSRing a body shell that's only made from 10 thou styrene is a bit fraught, to say the least. 

It's very easy to sand clean through the joints or panels if you're not careful, and I've done so a couple of times already. 

So I'm doing a patching job between the PSR sessions, not something I enjoy, but it's got to be done. The initial painting is approaching though, albeit slowly.