1/20 Studio 27 BMW Williams FW24

Modeling Descriptions and Photos
Mar-15-03

Driver's Seat
I think the actual seat is fabricated with "blue swede" which provides a nice grip. This prevents the driver to slide side to side as the car goes in and out of high speed turns. Here are the paints that I mixed to create the "swede" look. I mixed clear blue, cobalt blue, and desrt storm sand in the ratio of 1:1:1 respectively.

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Driver's Seat
At this point, I will sand the seat lightly to make the surface bit rough and then apply a flat coat to remove any shine.

Primer
For some reason, the Studio 27 resin body seems to absorb good amount of paint. I gave total five coats, two primer coats and three white coats. The body still needs some volume as I think it is lacking the artistic exterior look (hard to explain) at this point, I might as well give another heavy white coat! I tell you, it is all about look and feel...

Mar-21-03

Body Paint Work
The paint pattern on this car is not so trivial and it is somewhat tricky to mask the paint pattern. The first step is to make a copy of the original decal in actual size. Notice that the silver stripe decals also have the white stripes on one side of edge. This is a good idea from Studio 27 to allow some room for making a masking mistake. If you are confident, you can remove the white stripes!

Body Paint Work
There are several ways to mark the masking point and I decided to take an easiest route. The method basically involves lightly marking the masking lines with pencil...

The Front Wing
I just found out that Studio 27 is also releasing HP version of this car... It is not too late for me to change things around; I will build this as Compaq sponsored car (with the new aero package) as it was intended and will also build HP version later on. That way I get to have both Compaq and HP sponsored cars!

The Front Wing
The news is that Tamiya is releasing Fw24 kit this coming May. It will feature the late-staged aerodynamic setup with HP logos. I suppose that I made the right decision to build this car as a Compaq sponsored car. To be honest, I should just scrap this diary and wait for Tamiya's Fw24. Not many people build Studio 27, I would think the target audience of this diary is very limited...

The Front Wing

The Front Wing
Once the clear coat is applied, there is no turning back. If you absolutely have to start things over at this point (things happen), consider your decals to be lost. I would sand out the top clear coat layer and restart the painting process from priming.

The Front Wing
I don't have any close up photos on the front wing area and I cannot determine if the inner portion of the side panels and the bottom of the wing are actually treated with carbon fibers. For simplicity, I will leave them as black (or till I find the answer)...

Racing Damage!?
I didn't want this to happen, but it just did. If you have pets in your house, make sure you clean up your desk after building your kits, otherwise this will happen. The resin body sustained painful damages when it was pushed off from my working bench. The worst of all is that, I spent so many hours laying perfect white coats. This is just like life...

Let's Fix This!
This will be a good excercise, I will do my best to repair this. The painting will be the hardest task here...

Let's Fix This!

Let's Fix This!
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