Naives – My Blog

Decided to “plate” the buckles with solder, a little polishing will make them shine. Later when after I paint them, I’ll scrape off the paint to re-expose them.

Well, I’m still applying the 30 odd decals to the assembly. The decals are nice and thin, yet robust enough to survive some handling. One thing I’ve noticed though is that the carrier film is not smooth and this get worse when applied. If you look at the previous wing picture, you can see the roughness on the main wing section, and lower section, the areas that are blue. I’ll try to fix this with a thick clearcoat with sanding and polish. The day glow orange section could have used some more white backing in production. I’m going to live with this but using the second set of decals may be a solution here.
I’ve attached a scan of the decal sheets, the day glow orange came out a pale pink, but I think you can see the large quantity that needs to be applied. Be careful with the smaller day glow pieces that go on the inside of the wing, they are especially brittle. Surprizing for Cartograph, I’ve never had a complaint about their decals, at least until now.
The weekend forcast calls for rain so I’m looking forward to building some more, though I should use some of the time to repair my busted planes and clear up the mess in my house!

The Ligier is almost the same as the Benetton, which is why I’ve used it in previous comparison shots. Next time, if there is one, I’ll start the pictures earlier. The extra hole on the B195 is for a base mounting nut I soldered to the other side. I got to hand it to Tameo though, the neccesary small detail changes were made rather than just reusing the molds. One of these days, I’ll try to figure out why the 2 cars were so alike. (Ok, turns out that Flavio Briatore owned both teams, but the rules did not allow 2 teams to share a chassis, so different enough?).

Here’s the rapidly (?) emerging wing assembly, primered, painted flat black, only the trailing edge slats painted the correct blues and with some of the decals applied. There are some 30 pieces of decals for which I’m grateful but somewhat disgusted at the same time. The decals save me from painting and masking the 5 colors needed on a dozen surfaces, were sized to fit correctly with very little clear overspray but they needed to be a hair bigger to wrap around the edges. In some cases this is correct in that there were carbon fiber edges visible, but not on every panel. I might try to edge with paint but since this kit is to get me started in building again may just live with it. One other comment is that Tameo neglected to supply wing slat decals for both top and bottom, which is one of the reasons I painted them.

Having recently moved, I was able to go through a lot of things I’ve had on the shelf, and even started on a 1/43rd scale car, the 1995 Bennetton B195 by Tameo. Its been a while and my first kit with photoetched parts. I was able find this kit in Japan in the used section. The store clerk let me open up the box on the counter and check all the parts. I knew I didn’t have to do this with the Japanese but wanted to be extra sure. Sure enough, everything was there and half off to boot!

So far, I’ve spent about 20 hours on the rear wing, approximately 12 on the nose and 8 on the wheels! Could have built at least a couple of ARF radio control planes in the same amount of time. Part of the reason it’s taking this long is the fact that I’m working out construction methods. I started the kit with the rear wing using just CA as the glue. This assembly exploded on me when I dropped it a couple of inches on my workbench. Also found that the CA could be undone easily with just the right amount of force (CA meaning crazy glue in the US in radio control hobby circles, Cyano in the UK, Aron-arupha in Japan!). Decided to solder the parts as much as possible, which did take some time, especially trying to figure out how to keep the previously soldered pieces from coming apart. Answer came in using a low temperature solder (Tix, available at Micro Mark and others) and clamping, ie sandwiching the pieces with a clamp to physically keep them together. I should have taken pictures from the begining, but hopefully I’ll be good and have more pics for the later steps. Nose also took time since the shape had to be modified a bit to better match the real car.