s204: Interior (6) + others

When the seats and the carpets were ok, finally completed the steering wheel. To make it more realistic, leave the steering wheel molding line there, painted with flat black, and then drybrushing bright red to the molding line. Hope to represent the signature red stitches for S204 limited edition.

The reference of the S204 aftermarket wing should have the brake light, Scratch built it by using the transparent left over materials, cut, filed, sanded, painted and glued to the back of the wing.

Windows are also prepared and painted flat back at the inside

When everything had come to the finishing point, take a look at what had been done so far.

As everything was ready, it was time for final assembly and the minor touchups.

s204: Interior (5)

The carpet prepared previously are finally stuck to the floor of interior. Honestly, the initial measurements of the carpet are pretty sloppy.

I was pleasantly suprised by the outcome. There are only a few small trims and they all can flatly laid even on the curved surfaces.

s204: Interior (4)

Planned to replace the STi bucket seats with a Sparco rally seats from an old Hasegawa rally kit. The seats came with an installation bracket. But just put them on will make the seat very low even lower than the back seats. The brackets are raised by a styrene board slightly inclined to the front so that they feel much realistic in terms of inclination, position and height.

With minor fine tuning of the angle and of the brackets, seats can be put on for testing...

Not sure if some Sparco decal can be found otherwise, just put those STi on the front. From the references, it seems all the seats in s204 are from Recaro instead of Sparco. Anyway, both seats are sporty enough in it. Wish to also put on appropriate PE seat belts, but the seats look good on 5-point instead of 3-point. Let's see.

(20/6/2009)

s204: Tail Lights

Following the preparation of head lights, the tail lights are ready to be installed.

Found something strange about the colour of the respective lights...Check out the reference on the Internet and confirmed the s204 got all round lights not in red, anyway, go ahead and install them...

Fitting of the cover has some alignment issue. This is not a major problem which may be the thickness of the paint causes the cover cannot be good fit in the socket. Some sanding requires.

(18/6/2009)

s204: Head Lights

Seems the body is approaching the final steps, and it's time to do something that I'm the weakest, i.e. the transparent parts in the head and tail lights.

One of the techniques that I learnt in the past is: The most reaslistic part of the glass covering the head lights is the rubber rim for waterproof, some of the modelers would put directly the bare transparent part on the "eye socket", which turns out to be very plastic and toy. Here's what I did to the tail light cover:

I used a thick gundam marker to run around the cover (evenly!) and it's done.

Another technique that handling of head lights is make sure the under side of the cover and the socket are cleaned. It would be fuxked when you found dust INSIDE the head light after you glue it to the socket...

However, if you really prepared to "roll back" the glueing of head light cover, please please remember to use "White Glue" or similar stationery type glue.

The White Glue fits this usage for a few reasons:

1, it's water soluble, just in case anything happen to the transparent parts, wash it.

2, it won't eat the transparent parts. A lot of sad example in the past with excellent builds with foggy windows...:-(

3, it's cheap. Compare to the products from Testor or Modeller, it only costs about US$1.

4, it turns translucent after dried. Still transparency is better than translucency, so pay attention when apply it.

5, it's adhesiveness is mild. Just in case of any accident happened, parts can be taken out without any breaks. Dried glue can be easily wiped out and work all over again.

(17/6/2009)