Piccola's Projects: Day 4

I ran into a little dilemma… The outside of the main piece needed to be red, but the inside needed to be black. I remembered the blue tape that drivers used to cover their vents during the TX mile, and since it didn’t harm their paint, I thought I would use something similar. Bob (clearly amused by my efforts at this point) once again volunteered to make another trip to the store for the blue tape, asking if there was ANYTHING else I needed. Nope! (At least I don’t think so.)

When he came back with the tape, I made sure the GT was completely dry, and I covered the entire outside of the shell with the tape, cutting out a lot of small pieces to fit the holes, windows, etc. My thought was that if I taped it up, I could flip over the red part, spray paint the inside black, wait until it dries, and then remove the paint. This is exactly what I did, and other than a little bit of black paint sneaking under the tape, it turned out pretty nice.

Enough with the spray paint! It is now time to start putting the GT model together! :-)

The first things to assemble are the wheels. However, before I could put the front and rear suspension together, I would need to paint the 4 calipers. Ralphie has red calipers on his GT, so I got out my red paint. Even though they required paint on multiple sides, I was able to paint most of the calipers before assembling them.

When it was dry, I decided that the best way to paint the rest of the calipers was to first start the assembly. The pieces that needed to be assembled at this point were the front and rear axles, the disc brakes (rotors), and the calipers. I glued the calipers to the axle, but did not glue the disc brakes to the axle or the calipers, allowing them to rotate freely, while keeping the axle and calipers in one place.

Once assembled, I was able to touch up the red paint with the fine tipped brush while holding on to the axle without smearing the paint. Setting it down was tricky since it wanted to roll. I had to keep the calipers from hitting the paper towel, so I simply propped them up next to one of the other pieces until they dried.

While this was drying, I looked at the next step, which was to assemble the engine. There were a total of 11 engine components – all of which had been spray painted silver.

After looking at the real supercharger, I noticed that there were 3 sections that needed to be painted black on my model. I used the medium sized brush for this, and had no trouble with it. I did have to go over the black a couple times to keep the silver from peeking through, but (just like applying 2 coats of nail polish) I did not have to wait until the first coat was dry. :-)

Next, I noticed that the “Powered By Ford” coil covers were not on the model, so I would need to paint the cam covers blue, except for a center strip on each, which I will leave silver - this is where the silver "Powered by Ford" coil covers would be on the actual GT. In preparation, I cleaned the brushes in a 1/2" of paint thinner that I poured in a paper cup. And since I do not trust myself at ALL with paint thinner, I kept the cup outside in a large bucket for future use. Before painting these, I had to attach both sides to the “M-shaped” (^--^) plate. This gave me a place to hold on to while I painted, and provided a flat surface to set it down and dry without worrying that the paint would touch anything. To prevent blue paint from sneaking onto this silver plate, I used the blue tape.

The aluminum block with dual overhead cam cylinder heads was in two pieces, as well as the transmission. It was now time to glue each one together. There was a very thin area to apply the glue, and I found out that if you put even a hair too much on the piece, it would squish out the sides when you pressed the two pieces together. Luckily, using an extra paper towel cleaned most of it, but I did have to apply some more silver paint once dry to camouflage the glue. You cannot tell that there is extra glue on the engine unless you look really close – then it looks almost like the pieces were welded together.

Now that the blue and black paint was dry, I had to attach the supercharger to the intercooler, and then attach that to the plate that held the 2 cam covers in place. Well, there was a very thin rod under the supercharger that was supposed to slide into a small hole in the intercooler to connect them. I also had to apply a very thin layer of glue around the bottom of the supercharger to keep it in place. This proved to be extremely tricky! I must have had too much glue or paint on the rod as it snapped off when it made contact with the intercooler. When I tried to lift up the supercharger to see what happened, I noticed that some of the glue had already bonded (crookedly of course) to the intercooler. I had to rip the two pieces apart, apply more glue, and somehow line up both pieces perfectly in the 2 seconds I had before the glue cemented them together – all while trying not to get glue to squirt out the sides.

So... I took a deep breath, held it in, and went for it! Not bad!! Not perfect, but it definitely could have been worse! To see anything wrong with it, you have to look pretty closely at the two pieces - you will see it is not perfectly straight and the supercharger is about 2 mm forward of the intercooler.

I let this part of the engine dry, and then glued it to the top of the “V” of the aluminum block. Then I attached the transmission to the back end of the engine block, and from there, I glued the oil pan to the bottom of the engine.

One piece left and the engine will be complete! :-) The front end accessory drive had 2 belts that had to be painted black, as well as some of the pulleys. I had to attach this piece to the engine first to give me something to hold on to. Because the parts that needed to be painted were so tiny, I used the smallest paintbrush. When I used the brush for such detail, it seemed like the paint was too watery and the brush stroke was leaving behind no more than an almost sheer coat of paint rather than a thick black color. I had to go over the pulleys and belts several times before I was satisfied, and to my amazement, I did not make a mess or have to repaint any of the silver areas!!!