1/12 MFH Porsche 917 LH

[ModelTime]

Great body work and re-engineering. Fascinating. Great idea on the rod magnets. I wouldn't expect that amount of work on the 1:1 car much less a 1:12 scale replica. Now we know the rest of the story on what to expect and be prepared for on these MFH kits. If Tamiya can get parts fit right in plastic at 1:12 for 1/5th the price MFH should be re-engineering a few things before rushing the next high dollar kit out the door.

[sky1911]

Thanks again guys

@Roman: I purchased the magnets from the supermagnete webshop (German based), they have them in all sizes imaginable. Regarding your question about casting the doors: I don’t have the tool/materials/experience for that. What I could do, without having to put progress on hold, is create a mold from a slab of milliput, after covering the doors with plastic foil. Would that be helpful? Please note that my doors fit to my body (the car’s..), not necessarily to any other car… Btw creating a 917 from glassfiber sounds pretty ambitious!

Cheers for the shop. I bought mine through some ebay store a few years ago.
Re: the doors. I think that could work depending on how "solid" the milliput mould turns out to be, like "reinforcing" the back with the remains of old sprues or something . As for the fibreglass body. I fell in love with that idea on seeing an untreated raw body at the Porsche museum. I think it was a 906 or a 910 body, not painted, just the sort of see-through fibreglass shell, lit from behind / inside. Awesome! So I've given this a go in the past. I've moulded the um cockpit surround of either a 312T or 312T4 (likely the former) using fibreglass. Of course it's not one step gig, but rather sanding, applying some separation agent (wax or some spray stuff pt something or other), then apply a gel coat or two, then cut up some pieces of cloth (preferably fine weave to match scale, and some thicker ones for stability), brush some resin on the body and on the pieces and start laying them up and finally brush some more resin on the outer most layer. That worked really well, the surface of the mould was really really smooth after separation. This is also where the idea to stiffen up the body prior to assembly originated from. I had various ideas for that. One was to use plastic bags on the inside of the body and fill them with construction foam. However, that isn't a good idea, as that foam expands while curing (especially initially) and that expansion might put more pressure than needed on the body and force the body to go widebody, so not cool. Another was the one using sticks to interconnect the left and right sides of the body (like cocktail sticks or pieces of balsa), same for length wise and height wise. Then do the laying up of cloth gig and finally use plaster tape (like the dressing used for wounds only with added plaster) on the outer part of the mould to give it some stiffness or just plain old plaster. But for the plaster only treatment I would flip the thing over as otherwise the weight of the plaster would certainly force the body into some weird gaudi-esque gravity changed form
And once you have a useable mould, do the same steps with sanding, separation agent, coat, laying up for the actual piece. Only takes forever

[capri-schorsch]

Oh wow, that sounds crazy to me.
Roman i love your plans. First it sounds easy but at the end they sound like "my way to world domination".

Regards Christian

[sky1911]

I don't want to derail this any further than I usually do , but in general the steps are relatively easy, it just takes some patience. The part where it gets interesting is where you have to have to split the moulds into several parts as you cannot lay up an entire body or even the entire front section of the 917 in one piece or at least not without destroying the mould (which would suck, if you think of doing more than one body with that mould). Initially testing will be done either with your 917/10 or the 908/3 front as those are easy shapes.

[gp-models]

Those molds don`t have to be solid Roman, you also can use casting silicon but don`t use the stuff for resin castings, it is too soft to hold the shape, better using heat resistant silicon cause it is much harder then the resin stuff, no need to do a parted mold for these.
Looking forward to your paint or decal solution Marcus, should be interesting to follow!

[mvc]

Small update, minor progress...

Applied some primer coats and minor putty-adjustments. Needs to be sanded before applying paint.

Door fit has suffered a bit from reshaping the main body part (kind of logical, in hindsight) but I'm not going back from here.

And as you can see I'm doing a little project on the side to keep up the fun factor

Cheers, Marcus

[ferrarissimus]

It's a really great WIP so far. Congratulation to that clean building.
Unfortunately all the HIRO kits I build have those fitting problems. I used the same 300 W heater to reshape the front and rear cowling of my last WIP Ferrari 312 PB and it worked very well. Resin tolerates heat much better than Polystyrene but you should be careful and heat slowly.
The 917 is in my stock since some years, and I will take inspiration from Your WIP. Thanks for posting.
Regards ferrarissimus

[mvc]

Finally an update, still alive

Have been trying a lot of masking techniques, experimented with inkjet printed decals, but none of it was to my liking, looked good or felt right. So finally I decided to spray all body parts blue (Tamiya TS-93 mixed with approx 5% TS-9) and now I'm appying the original decals. I started with the easy (smaller) ones and now working up to the larger ones, hoping to gradually gain experience/confidence. They are a pain, very very brittle and seem to tear spontaneously, but with care and a lot of time (3-4 decals per session) it seems doable so far...

I'd love to get this one finished in 2022

Cheers, Marcus

[capri-schorsch]

Oh man, sad to hear that. It's a pain what are you doing there instead of having fun while building it.
That's an issue i have often read about the hippie decals. MFH should offer every customer of this kit a set of new decals for free. They have improved their decal quality since than.
It's a shame when they brittle just right in your hands.

Regards Christian

[sky1911]

The painting part is the one of all the tasks that scares me the most. You've done a brilliant job on the model build and with one small error everything can go south and you have to be careful when trying to fix that painting error to not knock over with your a++ what you've built before...

/spelling

I feel you.