This is the start for another WIP. There’s still one left to finish but after the Tameo McLaren MP 4/15 I was somewhat fed up with 1:43 and white metal in particular so I decided to have a go at some plastic for a change.
As the title says it this one’s about the Jordan 191, and who would have guessed….it’s gonna be the Spa-Version :-)
I don’t have to tell you anything about the kit contents or parts fit I think. To turn it into Schumacher’s first F1-ride there’s more to do than just add the correct decals though.
Most notably the front wing flaps have to be smaller, the rear wing gets some gurneyflaps and other bits, in the rear wing support there’s an extra cooler ( for gearbox oil I think ), the rear brakes get additional “periscope” style air ducts and there’s an extra round liquid tank ( for whatever…) at the front of the left cylinder bank.
For reference i’m of course using the Perfect File, plus the F1Modeling Schumacher Special and some additional pictures i found online and one important one for the front damper from Gurneyflap :-)
My plan is to do all these modifications and add a pile of details and corrections along the way. We’ll see how long it takes until I rather get back to 1:43rd :-)
For a change I started not by cutting up the kit pieces into even smaller bits but by actually putting some together with a bit of "racer’s tape" ( something that’s impossible with a Tameo…)
On my ongoing projects i learned the hard way that it can be quite tricky to assemble the suspension and set the model up right, once the “Tamiya-path” has been left and the suspension bits cut up. So I decided for this project to build a jig.
It’s made from MDF and metal pins and will hopefully help me during assembly to get the uprights to sit where they belong :-)
The actual build process started with the cockpit. I glued the monocoque halves and test fit the cockpit tub and seat.
The seat ( already stripped of the moulded in belts ) turned out to be seriously asymmetric
There needs to be some space for the gear shift linkage on the right side but Tamiya was really overly generous with it :-) On top of that the rather thick cockpit side walls were too low, so I replaced them with new ones made from 0.3mm styrene sheet
The seat was then also modified according to the reference pictures.
Now it fits the cockpit nicely:
I also started work on the monocoque. I cut off the roll bar ( this will return as an extra piece ), opened the holes for front damper and the fuel filler at the rear and closed some of the smaller holes for locator pins that I won’t need. I also reshaped the area around the head rest a bit with putty. All surfaces were sanded to get them straight, especially around the edges.
In the next picture the modified cockpit sits in the monocoque. I had to thin the sidewalls below the cockpit edges to make room for the higher cockpit walls and I added an indentation for the gear shifter ( or rather the driver’s shifting hand ).
That’s it for the start. There’s more to follow soon. I have to say that modifying and scratch building parts like this is what I like most about modeling. Much more than finishing paintjobs and such…. Let’s see how long that lasts :-)
