Brabham BT52b - The Guided Missile - Model Factory Hiro - 1/12

[DocRob]

The BT52b will be my next project. It will be straight out of the box, as MFH kits doesn´t need any aftermarket items, except some paint to match the decals, whjch in my case are produced by Number Five paints.
The Brabham BT52 was a very radical development with minimal bodywork and maximum power, in fact, it was the most powerful Formula One car ever and could generate up to 1400 horsepower in qualifying setup. With only four cylinders and 1,5 liter displacement, the BT52 was not easy to drive with it´s huge turbo push.
In 1983 the BT52 and BT52b had some success with Nelson Piquet and Ricardo Patrese in the Cockpit and Piquet winning the driver championship in the last race in South Africa.





The minimalistic missile like design, the blue and white livery and the relative low price for a MFH kit attracted me. It´s not one of their newer releases and I found some white metal parts bent and some resin parts a bit ill fitting. The metal is soft and can be easily bent back and the resin can be filed and sanded to fit, but I didn´t had these issues with my other MFH kits.

One example is shown here and if you build this kit, check it out early, as it will be hard to fix later. The cockpit tub receives two side fairings (shown below). You need to remove about 1mm, where the blue arrows point. There is a PE part to be added later, which is the perfect template, to show how much and where the resin needs to be removed.

 

Other than that, the prep time, before you really start a MFH kit can be a bit patience testing. Checking if all the parts are there, cleaning the white metal parts in the tumble cleaner, spread them out to dry and sort them according to the parts list and manual into sorting boxes.

The first steps of this kit include some equally tedious tasks. There are dozens of holes to be drilled, to accept rivets, which have to be pushed through the carbon fiber decals. I hope this will work. The CF-decals need to be cut to fit from a supplied decal sheet using an also supplied paper template.



Like with all kits, test fitting is essential, specially with MFH kits. You have to understand, how everything fits and intersects, to get it right. Here are the main body components, which show a good fit, at least after the above mentioned adjustments. The cockpit cover on the left (picture above) is a little warped, but I think it can be glued down with some clamps without heat treatment.



Cheers Rob

[Count0]

Heh, Thought you didn't like Turbo cars? I do. The Benetton Flame car is my Fav, but this one is up there too. 

[DocRob]

17 hours ago, Count0 said:

Heh, Thought you didn't like Turbo cars? I do. The Benetton Flame car is my Fav, but this one is up there too. 

Dead right, Count, but the BT52 has triggered some soft spots with me. First the missile like reduced design and second the sheer monstrosity of the engine.
Between you and me and the other five reading this post, my first 1/12 car build was a Renault RE20 Turbo , but only because I liked the colors and I took it as a learning mule for large scale car builds.
Do you mean by Benetton flame car the B194 with the refueling fire incident? I also own this kit from MFH and considered building it instead of the BT52.

Cheers Rob 

[BlrwestSiR]

One day I will actually start on a MFH kit from the stash (I have 4) but until I get the nerve up to do so, I'll keep watching you build yours. 

[DocRob]

23 minutes ago, BlrwestSiR said:

One day I will actually start on a MFH kit from the stash (I have 4) but until I get the nerve up to do so, I'll keep watching you build yours.

Please do, Carl. It´s a pleasant detour from plastic kits, always a challenge, but rewarding as well.

Cheers Rob

[Count0]

On 2/15/2026 at 1:50 AM, DocRob said:

Do you mean by Benetton flame car the B194 with the refueling fire incident?

No. I am a fan of Benetton in general, so I like all their cars. But this is the "flame" car

B 186

Idk what Europeans called this, if anything other than 186, but here it's always referred to as the flame car because of the colored brush strokes. Which maybe looked like flames to someone? I don't see it, but "brush stroke" car sounds a little too suspect to have caught on.

Powered by a development of the same mighty BMW engine as the BT-50, but without the Gorden Murrey chassis.

[DocRob]

I want to have some of the daring steps out of the way and therefore started with the monocoque. After drilling all the holes for the rivets and necessary clean up, slight sanding, I washed the parts in soapy water and finally sprayed them with my trusty Tamiya LP-1 gloss black, to have a good base for the carbon fiber decals.

 

One sheet of CF-decal is supplied along with a paper sheet as a template. I cut the copied paper sheet to the same size as the decal sheet and fixated them together with kabuki tape, to have no movement while cutting.



Some hours later, I had all the pieces cut out with a fresh blade and a 3mm punch for the four small holes. The larger holes were cut by hand



MFH kits from the pre Cartograph era have a protective clear foil over the decals, that´s why they are so reflective 



And this is, how they should be applied. I have to say, I really love pre cut CF-decals a lot.



Cheers Rob

[Nick70]

Excellent!

Ive been building one of these for a little while now, I started with the engine and rear suspension assembly. I’ve just moved on to the front tub. 
It’s my first mfh build, I thought it would be an ‘easier’ one to start with (not that any are easy in any way shape or form lol). 
Its not been too bad so far but it’s certainly pushed tested my patience at times

[DocRob]

20 hours ago, Nick70 said:

Ive been building one of these for a little while now, I started with the engine and rear suspension assembly. I’ve just moved on to the front tub. 
It’s my first mfh build, I thought it would be an ‘easier’ one to start with (not that any are easy in any way shape or form lol). 
Its not been too bad so far but it’s certainly pushed tested my patience at times

Thank you, it is my fourth MFH build and they are kind of addictive, so more will follow. I know the feeling, where the kits seem to be overwhelming, but usually there is a way and finding it is very rewarding. This is my second F1 build and I have to say, they are easier than the Cobra Coupe, I built. With lots of vac formed clear parts and doors, bonnets, etc., full bodied cars are more difficult.
I also considered starting with the engine, always the most fun part, but decided to get through the carbon fiber decaling and riveting first with the monocoque.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

I finished with the carbon fiber decals, which I cut in the former step along the supplied template. The carbon fiber decals are titled silver carbon, type 1, which interestingly is used for 1/20 or 1/24 scale. To me the fiber pattern looks very good and the templates were very exact luckily.
Despite the decals behaving very well with just a bit of soapy water under, I have some tiny blemishes, but these will be less visible after a matte coat of varnish.
I also applied the first set of dozens of rivets into the backside of the monocoque. The heads of the rivets were painted black beforehand according to my reference.





Cheers Rob

[BlrwestSiR]

Nice decal work there Rob. That's a lot of rivets. 

[DocRob]

Thanks Carl, there will be about 200 rivets total, the next batch will be applied into the cockpit front cover.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

I can´t see rivets anymore, phew. I managed to add all the rivets for the monocoque. Strangely the supplied ones were short by ten or so, but I had spares left from my Cobra Coupe. I painted some of the rivet heads black and left others in metal, according to my Komaki reference book.
Before adding the rivets, I used a steel needle to punch through the decal, which worked without issues.
There seems to be something with every step of the build and here it was the matte coat, which left some strange white residues in some spots. I can only assume, these were drops, unseen and translucent when sprayed and visible after drying. I may lay another layer of thinned matte coat on top, but try first with a tiny brush.

Speaking about matte coats, I always have trouble to find them working properly. In this case, I used Tamiya LP flat clear, but tried AK Real Color flat clear before, which worked well on other projects, but not this time. I also tried Winsor and Newton matte varnish, which also wasn´t up to the task.





Cheers Rob

[BlrwestSiR]

I wonder if the matter finish is being affected by temperature and/humidity. I've had matte get a frosty look when it's too humid out. 

[DocRob]

3 hours ago, BlrwestSiR said:

I wonder if the matter finish is being affected by temperature and/humidity. I've had matte get a frosty look when it's too humid out. 

Thanks for that Carl, it was my suspicion for a long time, that humidity has something to do with my matte coat issues, as well as some clear coats like GX 100.
We had a crazy day today, temperatures in the night about 10 degrees Celsius in the day varying between 15 and 25 degrees Celsius, but the real crazy thing was the humidity, which was about 90% in the morning, about 15% on midday and back to 85% in the afternoon. We have a climate change from the usual 80-95% humidity to Calima caused dryness of 15%-20% humidity. Calima is a (often) a storm from the deserts of Sahara, but this time there was no wind.

Cheers Rob

[Martinnfb]

And once again I am absolutely blown away by your work Rob. Splendid.