DBR1: Complete, finally

The decal sheet having re-surfaced, I completed the DBR1. This is only my second completed non-styrene kit, and the first from Profil 24 (the first was the Abarth OT 1300 from MFH). All in all a very nice kit which reproduces an historically significant car, and which is a pleasure to build if you accept it will be, as I said in my last post on this kit, an exercise in artisanal fabrication rather than assembly. And to be fair, it was a lot less work than getting a Jimmy Flintstone body to fit an AMT donor kit.



Quality of the build, from an appearance perspective, is obviously only fair. As I get better at these kits I expect the appearance to improve, and one of these days I'll start focusing on paint quality.



Looking closely at the photos, I see one of the dashboard decals has fallen off since I put them on last night ... I'll have to look through the parts bin.



The engine worked out quite well, even if the plug wires don't run inside a tube the way they are supposed to. Fabricating distributors was a lot of fun and in perfect keeping with the artisanal nature of the kit.



The paint still looks better in real life than in the photos, for some reason to do with lighting and my old point-and-shoot Canon SD 1000. Other colours all seem to work out nicely. In this case it is Tamiya TS-78, Field Gray, which is a flat military colour that is really green rather than gray. It went on over Tamiya light grey primer, and a coat of clear afterwards was meant to increase the gloss, but realistically a lot of polishing would have helped.

All in all a great addition to the Le Mans collection. So what's next? I have some ideas; stay tuned!