Aoshima Lamborghini Murcielago LP670-4 SV

[mattbacon]

Time for a separate thread for this one. Those of you with long memories may recall that I began this back in May, alongside the Tamiya Alfa GTA. Well... this one's finally got back to the bench, after I was distracted by finishing the GTA, the XJ220, moving house etc etc...



NIcely detailed parts and good engineering make this a pleasure to build. The engine bay is lined in cigarette foil. I'm not going to town on this one like the XJ220, but I'll busy it up a little. No point in wiring the plugs, though -- they are completely invisible under the inlet manifold. One thing to note, though, if you do decide to wire it, is that the wires come out at 90 degrees to the "obvious" direction...





Not many parts in this assembly, but it looks nicely complex. The engine is the chromed kit part, matt varnished and then treated to some Citadel wash. My owner has swapped his shocks for some aftermarket ones in purple and yellow...



The body in Giallo Orion. You can see the risks of painting parts separately here: the doors and air scoops are a very lightly different yellow from the body, thanks to different amounts of pearl. It was a lesson learned, hence painting all the XK220 body colour parts as physically close together as possible...

bestest,
M.

[countach79]

Nice colour combo on the SV
I didn't notice at a quick look till you mentioned about the colour difference
But yeah I can see it now
I will take your lesson on board and use it for my future builds as I paint the same way

Can't wait for more on this beauty

[mattbacon]

Thanks... Slow but steady progress over the holiday season...





A real symphony of black on black, hence the fact I've 'borrowed" the orange e-gear and paddles from a non-SV Murcielago special edition to brighten things up a bit... A lot of the cockpit is black or grey Alcantara, so I've tried to mix up the textures somewhat.




The engine out of the box. I'll busy it up a bit, but you really can't see the plug wiring under the intake manifold/airbox...




...and I couldn't resist a little test to see how it all goes together...

bestest,
M.

[countach79]

Looks great
Nice work on the interior, how did you go about doing the stitching?

[JeremyJon]

Nice work Matt, love the stitching on the dash board!

[gtziaf]

Nice progress...

Originally Posted by JeremyJon

Nice work Matt, love the stitching on the dash board!

+1

[cjsbosox]

Originally Posted by countach79

Looks great
Nice work on the interior, how did you go about doing the stitching?

I wonder the same

[mattbacon]

Originally Posted by countach79

How did you go about doing the stitching?

No clever trick, I'm afraid -- just a good quality sable 0000 brush and some Vallejo orange paint, plus decent reference pictures to copy... In fact, the lines are much more solid on the real thing because the stitches are small and close together, but if you PAINT a solid line it doesn't LOOK like stitching...

bestest,
M.

[countach79]

Originally Posted by mattbacon

No clever trick, I'm afraid -- just a good quality sable 0000 brush and some Vallejo orange paint, plus decent reference pictures to copy... In fact, the lines are much more solid on the real thing because the stitches are small and close together, but if you PAINT a solid line it doesn't LOOK like stitching...

bestest,
M.

Cheers mate
I'll have to try it on my next build
Thanks again

[mattbacon]

Thanks, chaps!

Now for a couple of updates in one, since I've been moving along but haven't got around to posting the pics.



This is the insides coming together. It's great to have a separate headliner, which can be painted independently. The real thing is more grey Alcantara so this is Vallejo German Grey, heavily drybrushed, decals added and then matt varnished. The silvering on the decals is a lot less obvious when it's the right way up!



Back end going together. This is where reading the instructions carefully at the start of the build to figure out all the parts that could be joined to the body and painted yellow at the outset. The instructions would have you add the extreme lower rear of the body shell at the same time as the wing. This way you can glue them on unpainted plastic for strength, prime and paint all together, rather than trying to tack them on at the end.



The headlights are very neat, though you do have to wrangle some pretty tiny parts. My "dopping stick" (a cocktail stick with a very small blob of Blu-Tac on the end) came in handy here. It's best to open out the holes for the head light locating pins slightly, and also check the stalks on the back of the lenses for flash that might get in the way.



Another mock up. The small "quarter-light" windows behind the doors are a bit tricky, and the instructions don't help much. If you look inside the car, on the interior roofline of the window, you can see a small tab and slot into which the projection on the top of the window fits. You need to engage these with an "up and under" that leaves the bottom edge of the window INSIDE the car body, and then swing the bottom edge out into position. You can't add the windows purely from outside, as the instructions seem to show...



The engine completed. There are some wires UNDER the Y-piece that comes out of the back and around the exhaust box, but you can't really see them. The only wires that really make a difference are the two pairs coming from the front of the rocker covers and disappearing back under the intake manifold.



I decided to go for raised inlets -- anything that separates the parts a bit will make it harder to spot the slight differences in colour between parts that were sprayed separately.




The mirror close up is here for two reasons. First, it's really not so easy to see how the two parts of the mirror fit together in the instructions, and it's slightly counterintuitive when you are telling yourself that the "legs" need to mount onto a flat surface ahead of the door window. This is how they should look. The second reason is that the seam between the small leg of the mirror housing and the main part is the ONLY place on this entire model where I have used any filler at all. The fit is extraordinary.

The second picture neatly demonstrates that if you put the mirrors on before fixing the doors, a dispenser of Tamiya 6mm masking tape is exactly the right thickness to prop the doors up with the mirrors vertical while your glue sets. These are attached with "Serious Glue", which takes about 3 minutes to "grab" and a couple of hours to set. But it's a lot tougher and more resilient than super glue, so if you knock a mirror it's not going to "ping off" taking some paintwork with it...

Next -- putting it all together.

bestest,
M.

[mattbacon]

Now the doors are on. The first thing I did was to apply silicone "Plastic Parts Grease" (from the bike store) to the hinge pins on the door arm, and the inside of the socket on the car body. This lubricates the mechanism and, more importantly, stops any kind of glue capillarying inside the hinge and locking it up. After some trying and cursing, I discovered the best way to deal with the door struts is to pop them into the hole in the body, and hold the body shell at angle so you can slide the relevant slot in the door over the hanging strut as you manoeuvre it into position. Once the door was solidly in place, I taped it shut and did the next one. There's a square cover that holds the door hinge in position inside the car. I'd scraped the paint off the plastic around the hinge, and left the cover unpainted, so we had a good plastic to plastic contact all around. I then used plastic cement to stick the cover in place, and left it overnight. I figure that sometimes you can get a lot of leverage on doors like this that might pop a superglued cover off, and I wanted to be sure that once the body was in place it wouldn't need to come off again to retrieve a tiny scrap of plastic. The extension of the strut inside the body makes it harder to put the body over the chassis, and you need to flex it rather more, which I also didn't want to have to do too often.

Which leaves us here:




The last thing I discovered was don't try to put the front wing on when the instructions tell you! I could NOT get it to fit properly onto a bare shell, but for some reason if you attach it last of all, with the chassis in place, it fits perfectly and attaches to the front edge of the chassis plate very nicely. So the body isn't coming off again. Acid test on the doors still to come, but at least the engine cover opens and closes perfectly!

bestest,
M.

[mattbacon]

Assembly more or less finished (though I mustn't forget to add the little front quarter indicator repeaters or reflectors). The sharp-eyed will notice that I've turned the rear wing round, thanks tio a timely "heads up" from a fellow modeller. And yes, the doors do open, and stay open. Now to find out if they close!





Clean it up, touch up the paint, and then time for decals...

bestest,
M.

[Tompidom]

Amazing work! Looks fantastic already!!!

[da_ashman]

Looks great! Nice work! & great tips too, i'll be sure to re-read this when putting mine together!

[mattbacon]

Thanks! I'm calling this one done now:




More and better pics in Completed Projects when she's had a visit to the studio...

bestest,
M.