Onethirtysecond shells - Hillman Hunter - part 3 - finished!
12/07/04 grills and window unit
click here to return to part 2
Once
the bodyshell was finished all that was left to do is make the grills
and the plug for vac forming the window unit. As the bodyshell started
life as one of my Avengers the rectangular headlight Avenger grill was
used as a starting point. In all three types of grill were to be made,
late 60s Hunter, early Hunter/Minx and the Singer Vogue/Gazelle unit.
Easiest is the late 60s Hunter, which is pretty similar to the Avenger
grill. All but the top and bottom bars of the grill were removed and small
pieces were fitted to join the two remaining pieces at the ends to form
the Hunters rectangular trim.The openings inside were filled with small
pieces of photo etched brass square mesh. Not strictly neccessary as most
of the grill is black anyway. For the Singer grill just the headlights
remain from the Avenger. The grill was built up from lengths of grill
originaly made from two Maestro grills stuck together. Closing pieces
and badge were added from plastic strip.The early Hunter/Minx grill was
made from castings of grill section originaly made just by sticking (fairly)
evenly spaced pieces of micro strip to plasticard and taking a mold. These
grill sections were pretty short but luckly the Minx has a vertical badge
in the middle which allowed two pieces of grill to be joined together.
Headlights are cut down Airfix TR4a. All sounds pretty simple but took
in excess of three days to complete! Both the Minx and Singer grills require
small modifications of the bodyshell opening for the headlights or grill
centre piece respectively to fit, this follows the full size versions.
The
plug for vac forming windows over is often the hardest part ( I know most
people don't have access to a vac former but apparently you can make them
out of an old bar fire and a Hoover....) as they are a slow process of
trial and error, wasting a lot of plastic along the way. This time I tried
a little experiment. If you look back at the picture of the finished model
on page two you will see that I haven't removed the front and rear screens
from the shell, only defined their edges. The side windows have been hollowed
out but only as far as the thickness I want the pillars to be - don't
try getting the side windows to fit flush, believe me it will drive you
mad and would probably have looked tidier with flat ones behind the pillars.
A spare hunter shell was coated in vaseline and put back into the mold
where it was filled with resin to past the window area. Once reasonably
set ( I prefer not to leave it to fully cure) the shell was taken out
of the mold and the body removed from the plug by simply destroying it!
This gave me a plug with flat (ish) sides and the front and rear screens
in place. It still needed a little furckling to fit but not much. You
can just see the tiny 1mm bleed holes drilled all the way through the
shell to allow the plastic to suck into the corners properly. Once one
has been made more plugs can be created by casting resin in a vac forming
and so allows the forming of as many windows as will fit in a sheet of
plastic all in one go.
Phew! Thats about it. Now you know how to make 'em why not do your own?
It should fit on the same trimmed Scalextric Datsun/XR3 size chassis as the Avenger.Body mounts can be made according to taste.
To see the finished kit click here
click here to return to part 2
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