R23 Floor and cockpit detail

With the basic body shell complete work can begin on the floor tray, engine/gearbox and cockpit. As none of the bodywork is removable there is almost nothing of the engine or gearbox visible. I therefore didn't bother super detailing this area, simply painting it all black!


The floor tray was painted gloss back with light brown for the wooden plank underneath. As there are large areas of the floor tray that are visible on the completed car it was necessary to apply carbon fibre decals to the visible areas. I started by using a masking tape template to get the correct shapes then cut them out of the decal sheet.


The cf decal I have is quite light in colour and when applied to the floor pan and to the suspension arms it 'stood out' too much from the overall gloss paintwork. To blend the decals in I over sprayed them with Tamiya smoke, a semi-transparent black paint. This effect worked quite well and makes the decaled areas appear less obvious.



With the very basic floor pan completed I began work on the cockpit. There is almost no detail here in the kit and as I lack sufficient source material to detail the cockpit I stuck to just doing basic seat belts and other odd bits.


The seat belts were scalemodelworks buckles though the belts themselves were made from masking tape as the supplied ribbon material was too wide to get through the buckles!

R32 Body Shell - Part 3

With the painting of the body shell now mostly complete it was time to apply the decals. As i was not using the yellow from the decals this was carefully removed so that the dark blue and silver demarcation stripes could be used. In addition to the kit decals I used some Mild Seven decals from crazymodeler designed for this kit. I chose to base this kit on an early to mid season car as I had the best reference pictures for this time period.

In addition to the kit markings I added some carbon fiber decals on the suspension arms, camera and exhaust shrouds. These are complex shapes and some thing I still require more practice at.

With all the decaling complete the whole shell was sprayed with zero paints lacquer. Again several thin coats were applied and then polished and treated with some turtle wax.


The end result is a reasonable looking body shell. Now for the rest of the kit.....

R32 Body Shell - Part 2

On to the painting. The body shell was initially primed with some Tamiya white as a base for the yellow. Revell provides decals for the yellow parts of this car. I chose not to use them however as I find trying to apply large flat decals over complex three-dimensional shapes rarely works well. Given the work I had to do to create the body shell I knew these decals wouldn't fit.

Instead of the decals I sprayed the yellow using zero paints Renault yellow. This is a pre-thinned matt paint that required several coats to built up into the final finish.

Between each coat I used safe cut paste by turtle wax to remove any blemishes. I used it again on the final cost to create a gloss finish to the matt paint. This would enable me to later apply the decals without needing an additional gloss coat.

The kit decals did come in useful though when it came to masking the yellow area off. I photocopied the decal sheet and used the yellow decals a a template to cut out of masking tape.

These were the applied to the body shell and blended together with some additional tape.


Fitting these masks reinforced my belief that the the yellow should be painted as they didn't fit at all well.With the mask in place the light blue could be sprayed. I had initially intended to use Tamiya sky blue but this proved to be far too dark so instead I used zero paints light blue. I did though lighten this with some white as I felt it still looked too dark in this scale. Again this was applied in light coats and polished in between.


The dark blue on the top of the engine cover was also masked and sprayed. I used tamiya dark blue for this as it matched the dark blue in the kit decals that were provided for this purpose.

With all the masking removed the few areas of over-spray were cleaned up and the body shell was ready for decaling.

R23 Body Shell - Part 1

Construction begins with work on the body shell. Typically of these Revell kits the fit is poor and the panel lines way too thick and deep. It is almost impossible to see panel joints on the real cars let alone in 1/24th scale.

The main body components were assembled and copious filler used to try and create the correct body shape.
The fit around the drivers headrest and the top air-intake was particularly bad, and I had to refer to photos of the real car to determine the correct shape for this area. This was then sculpted out of filler.


After several days of filling and sanding the body shell was primed with a neutral grey. this enabled any imperfections and marks to show up and be dealt with.


After a couple of weeks of work the body shell is now ready to begin painting.