What's on my desk? Part 33.

It's Tuesday again. New week, new blog.

So what have I been up to?

I started on the baseboards for the houses. These are made from 3x1mm wood strips, which I cut in half and superglued to the wall. It's pretty simple and gives a nice extra detail to the interior.

I still need to do this for the ground floor and in the other house. Then I'll need to paint them. To be continued...

On to the Virago then. As I airbrushed all the parts I only need to assemble the bike, brushpainting some details here and there. There's a lot of gold trim on the metal parts. Tamiya suggests painting clear yellow directly over the chrome parts to simulate this and I have to say: it looks convincing.

Here's both sides of the engine:

The cabling is supplied in the kit in the form of hollow vinyl tube. You cut this to length and push it over a small nib.

The rear wheel goes into the frame first. The springs are real items, but are not workable. It's a bit fiddly to get everything lined up, but I encountered no real problems here. The gold on the wheel is airbrushed Ammo acrylic paint, finished with some glossy varnish.

The engine goes into the frame next, followed by the fuel tank and some trim items. The gold lettering needs some cleaning up still. I'm leaving off decals until the end.

Overall construction is going quickly, but as there are exposed parts sticking out everywhere you need to take care where you hold the piece while attaching parts. Some sturdiness is provided by a number of screws (one is the rear axle, there are two in the engine mounts), so as long as everything is lined up properly it won't fall apart.

This one is going well, so I expect it to be finished either this week or the next. I'm finding it a nice introduction to motorcycle modelling. The model is from 1985 and is a joy to build, so I'm sure any of the newer Tamiya bikes are even better engineered.

That's it already.

See you next week!