Building A Resin Kit Step-By-Step, Part IV: Detailing, Decals, & Final Assembly

Heading toward completion on the Porsche 356 coupe resin kit build project, yay!

The paint is done and after a lot of polishing it finally looks decent, so now its time for the delicate operation of fitting the window insert. As I described in Part 1, the window inserts that come with these kits are tissue-thin vacu-form plastic which almost always need to be modified to fit right, but since I’ve already done all that work, it should be a simple matter to secure the insert to the roof of the car with a couple of dots of super glue and call it good, right?

I wish. Often the glue won’t adhere so I have to remove the insert and try again, but the worst thing you can do-which I have done in the past-is use too much super glue, so that it oozes out from under the window insert and gets on the body. If you do this, it will ruin your paint, and you’ll either be sanding it off and starting over, or trashing the whole thing and starting from scratch. But that’s not all that can happen; you can also get glue oozing out on the windows themselves, sparing your paint but ruining the window insert, meaning your beautifully painted car now has no glass. And lastly, what always happens to me is, if I don’t get the window insert in right on the first try or the glue doesn’t hold and I wind up having to try again, I inevitably get some of the glue on my fingers and then clumsily transfer that to the body or the windows, leaving me with a glue stain on the paint or the “glass” which I just have to hope is small enough that I can either buff it out or cover it with a touch-up.

It may sound like I’m just a klutz, but you try it and see how hard it actually is to avoid doing this! In the case of this car, the window insert was so badly formed that I had to slice it in half and take material out of it, so it needed to be installed in 2 pieces: I knew right from the start this was unlikely to go well, but I test fit and test fit and test fit before adding my miniscule amount of glue and trying to fit them in.

And sure enough, exactly what I just described happened: the glue didn’t stick on the 1^st try on either the front of the rear piece, the pieces popped back out of the car, I had to try again, and got a glue smear on the side of the body AND on the windshield! NEAT!

So there I was with the polish and the wax again trying to repair the damage, and I was able to get it look better, but there’s still a goober on the windshield. Remember, though, that since the windows are just cheap vacu-form plastic, they are foggy and distorted anyway even under ideal conditions, so ultimately you work with what you have.

So once I got past that (and all the attendant hissing and cussing) it was time to do the really fun part: the detail work and then the decals.

I added the details I thought were appropriate with a combination of a “True Chrome” paint pen and a black Sharpie. I detailed the hood vents, the front luggage compartment hold down straps, and added a little bit of chrome to the tail lights and door handles. I got a set of headlight decals from one of my terrific Road Race Replicas decal sets and added headlights-a delicate operation requiring patience and a good amount of setting solution due to the curve of the surface-and then added the racing stripes, a Porsche logo up front, and a couple of sponsor ads for Goodyear tires and Bardahl lubricant.

Then it was time to choose a racing number. At this point I’m out of single-use numbers. I haven’t yet devoted the time and effort to learning how to make my own colored decals, and I have exhausted all the single and double-digit numbers I can find in HO/1:64 scale decal sets, so I knew I was going to have to reuse a number that is already in use on another car in the fleet. There was no question that I needed a roundel that was yellow with black numbers to match the color scheme of the car, so after some consideration I elected to go with #26. That number is currently assigned to my ’68 Pontiac Trans Am, but I am toying with the idea of removing all 4 of the Trans-Am style cars from my racing fleet and building an entirely new, smaller fleet of exclusively Trans-Am racers, and replacing the TA cars in the racing fleet with sports cars. If I decide to do that, the #26 will be “vacated” and this Porsche will slot right in as a permanent new member of the fleet.

A few final minutes of clean up and she was ready for her first time trial!

And now, the moment of truth: her first race against the clock! The final installment will describe how that goes, and detail any final adjustments needed!