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Meng Ford GT40 Mk.II '66

Ken Miles car ABSOLUTELY!! :ro:
After seeing the movie Ford and Ferrari I went on a hunt for the old Testors GT40 kits. I found a Mk.IV but the doors don't open like the old Mk.II kit I built many Moons ago.
 
I have modified the front a little bit. I didn't like the way the blue paint looked, and the vent inlets were a little sloppy. Also, the strip along the top of the panel was not big enough. I cut a thin strip of styrene and used my rivet tool to make holes. There are a few too many rivets, and I may fix that by attaching bolt heads along the length after filling the rivet holes.

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The vent is still a little sloppy dang it. I don't "think" it will be seen. Shaping putty is not a strength of mine. I need to work on that.
Anyway, the engine is going together now. The instructions call for the lower portion and transmission to go on first, then put some pieces in that couldn't be put in if the upper half was on the motor. I want to wire the motor, but think I may need to do that on the bench. I need to find out where the spark plugs go so I can route properly. Still researching that. The internet is stingy with that info.
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The engine was pretty straightforward and simple. The parts went together easily with no mods needed for fit. Orientation is easy due to each piece only able to go on in one direction. I in particular needed that LOL. I painted all of the pieces separately with airbrush and assembled the bottom and transmission. The front of the motor with pulleys and belts were hand painted:
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My only real complaint about the motor is with the belts. I have always wondered why makers can't make a more realistic way of representing the belts. For instance, the next photo shows an area that should be open. It would have been easy peasy to do that with the mold process:
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The next photo may have been a little more difficult to leave open, but I think it should be open with just the belt connecting:
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That is my two cents on the review side. I guess I could have, and should have, opened them myself. It is done and I don't want to go to the trouble of changing it.
The motor installation seems odd. I would have thought the motor would be level with the body. It angles down toward the back, which makes me feel like I have done it wrong. If anyone knows, please let me know. But, here it is, installed:
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That is it so far. I will build the top of the engine after looking into the wiring order. Thanks for looking!!
 
Nice scratch work!

You did mention that was lead wire, no? If so, you definitely don’t want to try and anneal that!
The lead wire didn't need it,. It stayed in place very well. It is just so soft that attaching it to the inlet was a bit tricky and messy. I think a more robust wire would have been better, had I know to anneal it. Now I know, hopefully I will remember. Maybe I can build another version, the car that took first, in the black color. Then I can experiment with annealing.
 
I would love to learn how to do that. I am sure there is a YouTube video on it
Not that hard Greg. Simply hold the wire above a heat source until it glows a dull red and pull it away. The thinner the wire the less heat and more touchy it can be. With copper and brass wire a candle is usually all that is needed. A little practice will give you a feel for it. Steel wire might need more heat than a candle, but then I have a propane torch.
For example, with copper wire you will start 3 or 4 inches above the candle and slowly lower it until you start seeing it heat up. Thinner wire will need to be heated and moved quickly once it starts to glow. I have had thin wire melt so be aware. It just takes a little practice. I also heat PE this way with care. If you have a piece of photo etch with holes in it that has to be curved, it is going to have to be annealed or it will tend to bend at the holes instead of curving.
 
Not that hard Greg. Simply hold the wire above a heat source until it glows a dull red and pull it away. The thinner the wire the less heat and more touchy it can be. With copper and brass wire a candle is usually all that is needed. A little practice will give you a feel for it. Steel wire might need more heat than a candle, but then I have a propane torch.
For example, with copper wire you will start 3 or 4 inches above the candle and slowly lower it until you start seeing it heat up. Thinner wire will need to be heated and moved quickly once it starts to glow. I have had thin wire melt so be aware. It just takes a little practice. I also heat PE this way with care. If you have a piece of photo etch with holes in it that has to be curved, it is going to have to be annealed or it will tend to bend at the holes instead of curving.
I watched a video on it. It was on a jewelry making channel, but I got the idea. I like the candle trick. I think I have a blow torch somewhere too. I want to play with this just to see how to do it next time. Thank you!!
 
I think Ford dropped the ball by not making this car public. Maybe they did and I just have never seen one. Just like I have never seen a Dodge Viper on the road either. This car would have given the Corvette a real challenge as far as sales. I love the BigLot find! We love going there and see what hidden treasures they have. That particular car, the gold #5, is going up for auction at Sothby, expecting it to fetch $12million+.
I
I was wrong about the scale. It's 1-32 scale.
 
There were some chassis parts that needed to be installed. Two of them were air vents, which looked a little fat at the metal end. I used a dremel tool with a fine bit to grind the thickness down. Here is the difference after comparing the thinned one to the stock one.
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I thought I would be clever and use Bare Metal Foil on the "metal" end of the pipe. It looks like foil...
I painted the framework pieces and then test fit before gluing. As before, they were a very close fit and may not have needed glue, even though I used it.
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I put the upper part of the motor together, painting the parts separately, then assembling. The "linkage" looks a little chunky. Adding some photoetch parts may have been a good idea for that. At least they included linkage! First car I have ever made that did, so kudo's for that.
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There was nothing special about the ignition wire order. I had a REALLY hard time making the plug wires. I have Detail Master wire, and the kit comes with a "boot" wire. I made the boots so that they were bent 90 degrees. That meant there was not enough room on the top of the distributor cap to accommodate the wires with boots attached. I tried very many different materials and ways of making the boot, but none of them looked good or fit at all. I ended up using the red wire without an extra boot, and I bent the end 90 degrees and dipped in black paint to thicken the end and simulate a boot. It doesn't look terrible. It doesn't look "good" either, but I will clean that up with paint.
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I drilled holes in the block to accommodate the plug wires:
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I attached a wire loom similar to the one on the original car and routed the wires to the holes, going underneath the exhaust ports like the real car did. The exhaust "snake" goes up instead of down, so that was the best way to route the wires. The firing order if correct unless I goofed up putting the mass of wires in.
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The coil wire will go to the coil, which I think is included in the kit and attached to the fire wall, but that is coming up next in the instruction sequence. This is where I am at the moment. I will build the exhaust, but am not sure how I am going to paint it since I am officially "Forbidden" by Gail to use the airbrush and spray booth until my cold is better, which is a very upper respiratory cold and is kicking my butt. My doctor also said the same thing, except he said "recommended". He didn't hear that I have pneumonia when he checked, but my daughter, son, and granddaughter all have pneumonia! I HAVE to be better before my surgery on the 20th. I do not want to have to postpone. This agony needs to end! So, to summarize all of that; I don't know when I will be able to continue on the car. It may be a few days. But, it is "to be continued" for sure.
 
It has been a minute since I posted about this build. I have been busy building! But I have been taking photos as I go. Let's see...where was I? The engine had been wired. I had to decide how to proceed. Should I put the exhaust on the top part of the engine, then put everything on, or put the top part of the motor on in case of any fiddling needed to fit, then glue on the exhaust. I went with the latter. Turns out, unnecessarily. Put the exhaust on first,, then put the top of the motor in place. I put the exhaust pieces together and painted them. I used various colors of metallic paints, adding blues and purples to show different degrees of heat. It turned out OK. It looks better in person than it does in this photo, that's for sure. This is a very tight fitting configuration with little or no wiggle room at all.

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I researched the coil as much as I could and really never could find the exact information I was looking for. It seems that the ignition wire goes to a coil relay, and there are two coil packs, with each of those going to those vertical tower things on each side of the motor. I have no idea what they are. I found some decent photo of wire/tubing/pipe routing. Honestly, the best photos I found were from a custom built 1:10 model in the Ford museum. I thought they were photos of a real car until I read about it. Almost defied belief. So, I used those as reference for the coil routing. I used lead wire, since I don't have the braided hose with blue fittings. It will be fine I think. The coil relay is not included in the kit. I made something to resemble it. You can see in the second photo that I scratched the first one and built another. I drilled all of the holes and made the "fittings" from brass tubing painted Vallejo Gunmetal blue. As hard as I try, I cannot build clean. It seems there is crap in the paint, or glue drips, or something causing it to look sloppy. When I try to fix it, it just gets worse!

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Ok, so as you can see, the firewall is in, so I turned to the seats. There are supposed to be silver rings with a black center for the buttons. I tried every technique I could think of to set silver into the indentions, but the results were severely inconsistent with one good one for every five bad; so I ditched that effort to just make silver dots, and that turned out pretty clean. The seatbelt material provided was nice, but the long, precut belts are too short. Fortunately, the remaining belt material is enough to make longer belts, so know that going in.
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I installed the seats
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Next I went to work on the dashboard. It wasn't terribly difficult, and I found some decent reference for it.
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The original car looked like it had red Dymo tape with raised lettering telling what each button was. I didn't have any red decal stripes so I did my best to hand paint little red "labels" under each switch. With the dash installed, the whole thing reminds me of the Tumbler from Batman Begins.
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It's time to start work on the body. Here is where I get a little scared I won't be up for the task. I wanted to finish the inside of the body first, which involved closing up a bunch of ejector pin divots, and I am getting rid of the Meng logo just in case:
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The back hood needs to be matte back inside, so that will be easy.
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The outside of the hood has a piece of glass installed and some scoops. The J will get painted separate then installed later.
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Primed and sanded, and reprimed, and ready for my close up.
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It turns out the color is WAY too dark. I though it would be close enough to use. I have to lighten that up considerably!!
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That's it. I will make a new batch of blue that is hopefully closer to the correct color tomorrow after this dries overnight.
 
Thanks everybody! Gail has asked me to lay off using the spray booth until after surgery. I am having my surgery on Monday, and I still have the remnants of a cold and a cough won't go away. She is afraid it is because I am breathing in vapors, even though I wear the double vent full gas mask, have the spray booth vacuum going, and have a full room air filter one foot away from the spray booth going on high. I pick my battles, and am giving in on this one. I will call it part of the 5 day pre-surgery cleansing. I don't expect any complications from surgery. I am having two; one on Monday to put the metal spacer in between L2 and L3, then Wednesday they will fuse that to the previous hardware to keep it from moving. Hopefully come home either Thursday or Friday. My previous surgery October 2021, was actually three surgeries; front, side, and back. They had to go in through a six in incision through my belly to put the spacers into my spine, and the belly opening caused a long and painful hospital stay. I am not having to do that this time so healing should be quicker. After that I can use the spray booth again. In the meantime I am painting a Viking Chieftain figure. Maybe I should post some shots of that in its own thread...
 
One last post here before going to bed and get some rest before leaving in the morning. My order from Detail Master came in, and I had ordered some braided ''hose'' and compression fittings for the "store". I brought some home to do a quality test before I sell to my customers...

Ahem... no, really!

I changed out the coil wiring with the braided hose. Better? Worse? No difference? This was the smallest size of wire they had. It looks a little big, but the cool factor over the lead wire I think makes them stay and not go back. It was incredibly hard to get the wire through the fittings and I had to twist the daylights out of the wires which deformed them. It definitely would have looked better if the wires were not crapped up. I was a picture framer for 20 years. I bet I have some small hanging wire somewhere in the basement that will work better! I will look after healing up.
What sayest thou? There is a little inset comparison image to judge by. I definitely like the more legit looking fittings. They were expensive as crap though at ten bucks for 8 of them. Meh, it'll be fine...
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