MiniCord
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5
Location: Gatineau, Quebec, Canada |
Neko Rover Mini Cooper Monte-Carlo 1994 Fujimi.
Ok, I see noone has posted here so....
An Model I built 3 years ago. It is the Fujimi 1/24 kit of the Neko Rover Mini Cooper 1.3i from the Rallye Monte-Carlo 1994 of Timo Makinen and Paul Ester.
The first thing I did was to work on the interior. The original dasboard (showed in the picture in white) was a reguar Rover dasboard with the Air conditioning unit for cars sold in Japan. I removed the air conditioning unit at the bottom and made the dashboard panels and the rally computer usung styrene sheets. The dashboard decals didn't came with the kit so I had to do them by computer and print them.
The fire stinguisher wasn't provided on the kit so I made it from scratch too.
The seats of the kit were the regular Rover "road version", or a bucket seat from the 60s, surelly not fit for this model. So I used the seats from another kit, a Ford Escort RS Coswort Rally and I made the COBRA and MINI SPORT LONDON logo also in the computer.
The real car has a full rollcage but I decided not to go there. It was too much work and is not really worth it. I used the rollbar provided with the kit.
The chassis is pretty simple and is missing the sump guard right now. Again another piece that was not supplied in the kit. This part was made using a very thin styrene sheet and to give it the aluminium appearance was covered with Stick On Brushed aluminium decal.
The outside of the body was a little tricky to work as everithing comes in one piece, so paint the wheel arches, door handles, stops and window gaskets need a lot of patience, to avoid damage to the red and white paint finish and to stay within the boundaries.
The fog light was relocated to the bootlid, just as the real car.
I have also added a Fire Stinguisher button with a seam pin and from scratch made the T-shaped swich master.
Here are some pictures of the model in the last steps. The only things missing are the decals, the mirrors and the sump guard.
Somehow it made me sad the idea of applying the decals. It looked so nice without them.
And after 4 hours of fighting, I finally applied the final sticker. It was a real nightmare! I the quality of the stickers was awful. They were extremly brittle and they just simply didn't want to stay in place. But I was lucky tho, I had replacement sticker set from a Mini that I didn't use, otherwise I would have end up with half of the stickers missing. I just hope they don't start falling by themselves in the future.
Here the final pictures.
Miguel
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