- closed engine cover
- higher flip-ups at the end of the sidepods with an endplate at the inside
- lower sidepod-endplates
- outboard rear brakes
To create a rough shape of the engine cover I used polystyrene material. First the top with the openings for the air intake funnels …
… then the sides. The engine cover is a bit wider as at the JS11 (it has to be as the width and size of the air intake funnels are given)
Before I continued to shape the engine cover I sprayed the chassis inside aluminium and the cowling inside black, fitted the cockpit rollover bar and glued the cockpit cowling onto the chassis after inserting the upper front suspension arms. Then I masked the front suspension and the cockpit inside as I will have to spray the chassis a few times with primer and finally blue.
To shape the engine cover I use two component resine putty.
And here the first mishap occurred. I must have gotten a faulty batch as the resine would not harden even after several days
. So all the grey pieces seen in the above two pictures had to be removed and were replaced by Tamiya’s two component putty. I only had the slow setting type available so everytime I used it I had to wait a day before I could sand it. When I then saw a bit where I had to add some more resine another day went. So it took me about a week to shape the cowling – adding resine, sanding, priming (with the Tamiya grey stuff), correcting by adding resine, sanding, priming, …When that was done and the engine cover had an acceptable shape I added the higher flip-ups at the sidepod ends and the respective inside endplates as seen on the inserted reference picture.
Then I adapted the shape of the sidepod endplates which are slightly different from the 1979 and early 1980 types. The lower endplate is the older version which protrudes above the sidepod level as seen at the reference insert pic beside it. So I cut the endplate upper edge according to the sidepod shape as seen at the upper reference insert pic. Furthermore I removed the skirt which is moulded together with the endplate and added a bigger skirt which can later be adapted according to the ride height of the car. The moulded skirts are far too small in comparison to all reference pics I have. That goes for the 1979 version as well.
After another round of sanding, priming, filling, sanding, priming etc I got the following result:
By now I have primed it white and sprayed it blue (no pictures taken yet). Then I realized that the opening for the roll over hoop is wrong as can be seen in the following insert reference picture. The left arrow shows the wing profile underside I added when enlarging the flip-ups
So I have to close the wrong opening (putty, sanding, priming, ...) and add the correct two holes through which the roll over bars will go. Here too this applies to the 1979 version as well.
That’s were I stand at the moment. I won’t be able to do much until the weekend but watch this space for more then.
