[Tamar]

Posted 25 February 2019 - 04:02 AM

The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 6 weeks and counting
 
Another week has flown by, work on the Ford is making good progress, but I'm running seriously behind with my post updates.
Last week I finished the master of the cockpit, vacformed the first prototype and ran a second test in Best, checking the modified body for any clearance issues with the modified chassis. But let's pick up where I left with my last post.

In the driving seat 
As I mentioned before, the stock Scalex interior was lacking a bit of detail..and half of the driver ..not to mention the rudimentary driver seat.
On almost all slot cars the driver and his position in the car are hideously incorrect and when they make a vacformed version of the stock interior most of them will look like shapeless..blobs. Seems like if you want to save a bit of weight you should not care on how it looks...well.... I do.

With all the space you need for the chassis bits (not to mention the Oxygen Chip) there's no way to replicate the depth of the interior in true scale, so its more about creating a suggestion of depth and detail.
Doesn't take much to do so, a few rectangles of styrene, some wires here and there. I'd collected tons of reference images..but in the end you just have to wing it.
It does help that on contemporary Sportscars the seats are thick and well padded. And with the HANS devices the helmet and driver have got a vacformable shape.
A bit of putty here and there to properly "seat" the driver, used some thin foam I had in my bin box for the padding.

Created a bit of extra room for an Anglewinder Flat-6 in the passenger compartment so the interior would fit both SW and AW configurations, at least so I hope 
 

 
Going pear shaped
Below the various steps I made to make casts of the masters. Your never to old to play with Lego, excellent stuff to make cast boxes, yeh they will leak a bit, but nothing too bad. More important when you make vacformed masters is to keep in mind they have to be pear shaped, or beter pyramide shaped. They have to be wider at the bottom than at the top..otherwise you won't be able to get the master out of the vacformed PET. 
A trick to help you go pear shaped when obviously your master is not...is to mount the master at an angle in the Cast box. Lean the interior backwards to capture the most of the dash and driver detail. Same goes for the Motor compartment, Slightly tilted backward so I can vacform both sides of the firewall.

 
 
Negative mold to cast positive master.
So here's a picture of the "negative" silicone mold and the positive resin cast, looks nice and clean, but its actually a messy business. Unfortunately my resin was way over date so I needed to add more harder for it so set which meant more air captured in the cast and several cast to get a few decent ones. But for the first test it would do.
A lot of holes were drilled in the"deep" parts of the resin cast to allow the vacform machine to suck the Pet into the cavities


Here's a shot of one of the first vacformed cockpits..with just a light shot of satin black and some dabs of Vallejo white primer. Cut back stock roll cage fits like a glove.
A lot of work considering how much detail you'll actually see when he's mounted in the car...but at least it gives the impression of a proper race driver...in the driving seat 



To be continued

With kind regards
Tamar