Renault RE20 Turbo - Tamiya - 1/12

[DocRob]

13 hours ago, GusMac said:

All the revisions definitely pay off Rob, looks stunning.

 

13 hours ago, Peterpools said:

The corrected work looks awesome - perfectly done.

 

10 hours ago, GazzaS said:

Oh yeah...   the engine looks much more real.

 

2 hours ago, HubertB said:

Indeed, great improvement 👍 !

Muchas gracias amigos, the ignition wiring still looks overscale, but I don't have yellow cable or tube in a better size, but the Model Factory Hiro tubing looks more like the real thing. I wonder how much will be visible later, with the exhaust on top, but it needed to be done. The Tamiya tubing looked a bit toy like.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

Looks mighty fine to me

[DocRob]

My new compressor arrived after a long week of making up the engine and cleaning parts. A task, not to underestimate wit this kit. Every part has to be inspected, sanded, scratched with a blade, the age of the mold forms is obviously. I will show you a total un-Tamiya look with lots of scratched off material only from the turbo system and gear housing .

Finally I had to test my new Sparmax compressor and what better to try is spraying yellow onto the body parts. I really like the result, where only minimal polishing will be needed before I apply the decals. I sprayed the heavy thinned Tamiya LP8 with low pressure at about 13 psi or 0,9 bar.

Next test was spraying lots of the innards with different metallic colors, AK's Extreme Metal Aluminum and from the Tamiya LP range titan gold, titan silver, gun metal, pearl silver and finally semi matte black for the air intakes on the upper body.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

Phew, decals are on and I, as an old decal coward have to say, these Cartograph decals are the real deal. They are very opaque and fit like a glove, if you made a precise masking job between yellow and white. Even the superfine pinstripes fittet, bordering the yellow. For the first time, I used Tamiya Decal adhesive and so far, I have no complaints. The standard one was used on flat surfaces and the additional softener type was used on contours. There is one tiny fold on the curved front black stripe, but I hope with some stronger softener this will vanish.

Before decaling, I wet sanded all the body parts with 6000 and 8000 grit and the surfaces were absolutely smooth and the color borders got rid of the tiny edge from masking. The rear wing was resprayed, because I polished through the edges on a tiny spot. I painted all the rivets on the body with a precision brush for a little bit more detail.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

So glad your Sparmax is working like a dream - I've had many compressors over the years and by far, the Sparmax has been the absolute best.

WOW, paint work and decaling is spot on the money and looks so good, no, it looks absolutely perfect.🏆

 

 

[GusMac]

Looking very sharp Rob. Nice choice of driver as well. Arnoux was always one of my favourites as he had a bit of that Gallic flair.

[GazzaS]

Very nice work with those decals, Rob.  Cartograpfh...   love em!

[KevinM]

On 8/5/2023 at 1:39 PM, Peterpools said:

So glad your Sparmax is working like a dream

Had to buy one Saturday and the decals look sweet!

[DocRob]

On 8/5/2023 at 7:39 PM, Peterpools said:

So glad your Sparmax is working like a dream - I've had many compressors over the years and by far, the Sparmax has been the absolute best.

WOW, paint work and decaling is spot on the money and looks so good, no, it looks absolutely perfect.🏆

Thank you Peter, my experiences with compressors are limited, as the old one survived 34 years of use. Until now, I'm satisfied with the device, noise level is acceptable and most important, it produces a regular adjustable airflow.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

On 8/5/2023 at 9:59 PM, GusMac said:

Looking very sharp Rob. Nice choice of driver as well. Arnoux was always one of my favourites as he had a bit of that Gallic flair.

Thank you Gus, I have to read a little about Arnoux. I'm not so much into racing and don't know a lot about the drivers. I will fill this gap within the next days.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

On 8/7/2023 at 9:11 AM, GazzaS said:

Very nice work with those decals, Rob.  Cartograpfh...   love em!

These decals are great, Gary. I normally fear decaling, but here everything went right. I don't have many experiences with Cartograph, but they worked perfectly on my ZM KAI Phantom, which was literally plastered in decals.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

20 hours ago, KevinM said:

Had to buy one Saturday and the decals look sweet!

Good move Kevin, you'll like the kit besides the enormous clean up effort necessary. Generally all goes together nicely.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

I finished the body parts, with a generous coat of clear coat. To be precise, one fast drying very thin coat, to protect the decals from the thinner and then a heavier coat of GX-100 for the deep shine. The clear coat sprayed very well and I figure, my bad results with GX-100 resulted in mixing the stuff with thinner in a plastic jar, which may got spoilt by the thinner. Reminder to myself, always use a glas jar for adding the leveling thinner.
After a proper curing time, I used the three differently grained Tamiya polishing pastes and finally the Tamiya polishing wax and got a near perfect surface. Near perfect, because I had some dust issues during spraying, something I never had before, given the normally high humidity here. There is nothing, I can do about it, but I will look a bit deeper into the subject, to see, if the new compressor might be involved into the issue. There is always a hair in the soup, literally .

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob, BRAVO🏆

Absolutely brilliant. Paint and decal work is simply stunning and I'm wearing dark sunglasses to protect my eyes. 😎

 

[KevinM]

Nice!!!!!!!

[DocRob]

Today it's about 40° Celsius with a humidity of 10 percent, yesterday it was 22° Celsius with 95 percent humidity, what better to do than spent some time in the relatively cool cave, instead of getting a heart attack.

My worktop is absolutely cramped with half build sub assemblies, pre-painted parts, so I need to get a bit of order into the mess and assemble some of these.

I started with the seat belts. The kit supplied ones look good, but I had a set of Hiro belts and decided to use them. Some of the buckles are cast white metal, the rest is made from PE. Assembly is a lot easier than 1/32 seat belts from HGW, but I had difficulties to find a CA glue adhering to the ribbon. Later, I realized, that the ribbon parts should have been glued with the supplied two sided adhesive tape. Would have been great, if that would have been mentioned in the manual. The seat looks super cool now and again I have to say, I really love the semi matte black from the Tamiya LP range.

 

Next were the front suspensions with many snap fit parts. naturally one of the arms broke, but it could be repaired easily. The steering does not work like suggested in the manual, but I think it's impossible to get it working at all. The Tamiya approach with working steering and suspension is until now the area of the build, causing the most problems.

On to some detail work. I butchered an old laptop, which was waiting to get binned to get fine electric cables and added some to the instruments and racing computer.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

WOW! Looking so good and I just love the harnesses. Adding the wiring is a huge plus as it not only adds details but the colors add interest on their own.

 

[DocRob]

21 hours ago, Peterpools said:

WOW! Looking so good and I just love the harnesses. Adding the wiring is a huge plus as it not only adds details but the colors add interest on their own.

Thank you Peter, I like the harness too, would be interesting to see, how it compares with the Tamiya supplied one. The wiring was simple, but adds some fine detail. Adding braided hoses and resin connectors is another story, as I have to drill them out with a 0,5mm drill bit and insert brass rods.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

As mentioned before, it was time to get some sub assemblies off the bench and I installed the air coolers and turbo chargers. You have to have an affection for clean up, if you build such an old kit of a turbo charged car. Lots of tubes and connecting parts with ill fit and lots of flash and burr.
For the air coolers, I added some resin connectors which were drilled out and inserted brass rods, but they are buried under the air ducts, out of sight.
I glued the turbo charger units to the air intakes and engine and fitted everything into the chassis for a test. With a bit of tension, everything snapped into place without braking luckily. 
The chassis gets more and more cramped, to maintain the real car couldn't have been an easy job.

Cheers Rob

 

[DocRob]

The engine is now permanently attached to the fire wall and then I started adding some silver braided lines instead of the large diameter black tubes, supplied by Tamiya, which looked downright horrible. To attach the braided lines, I inserted 0,2 mm nickel silver rod into the ends and secured these with a tiny drop of CA. Then these rods were inserted into pre drilled holes.
I also started to make some order to most of the fuel lines and added the oil tank (?) to the firewall, which was before fitted with pre painted and pre drilled resin connectors, instead of the simple lug, Tamiya provided.

Cheers Rob

[Bomber_County]

Absolutely stunning build Rob. Did you use your new H&S to spray this??…..

[DocRob]

Thanks Phil, I used the new airbrush only briefly, as I prefer the bigger cup for working large scale and this does not fit too handy onto the Giraldez. I checked the function of course and it works like a charm with a much more sensible trigger, than the normal CRplus. I prepared some pics for a soon to write small comparison of the two airbrushes.

Cheers Rob

[Peterpools]

Rob

Awesome progress with the F1 Renault, looking fantastic, as the individual sub-assemblies come together.

After seeing your new air brush equipment and knowing how well 'new' equipment looks, feels and performs, I ordered a lot of cleaning equipment and some replacement parts from Spray Gunner in Florida. When the box arrived the other day, I spent well over three hours stripping down my two H&S Infinity CR Plus AB's, as well as my two Iwata AB's, disassembling them down to the last nut, washer and seal. The 'Gang" looks brand new and I'm eager to give them a go. Thanks for the inspiration. 

 

[DocRob]

Thank you Peter, nothing better than a well maintained airbrush. I clean mine very thoroughly all the time after use. From time to time, I do the same like you and clean all the hidden parts and check the seals.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

The first half of the day was very frustrating. The exhaust to turbocharger tubes were the worst fitting parts, I ever have seen on a Tamiya kit. After two hours of nerve wrecking test fitting, I decided to glue them step by step into place as best as I could, using CA for a fast bond. Some tubes, I heated a bit with a flame and altered the radii to fit better. All in all, it looks horrible, but that's the way it is. The tubes were painted matte black and then received a misted coat of Extreme Metals jet exhaust, followed by metallic blue.

The better part of the day was used to marry the engine section with the firewall to the front body. Here the fit was surprisingly good, given the amount of parts, which had to fit at his step simultaneous. After dry fitting three times and looking for all the connections, I finally glued everything together with CA-glue. 
Afterwards, I connected some hoses and dry fitted the whole assembly into the chassis, to check if everything fits, which it luckily did after some wiggling. 

Cheers Rob