Seat Córdoba - Rallye Catalunya 1999

 

 

I started this kit at the end of last year but I just could not get paint to stick to this and I ended up running out of yellow paint. So I bought another pot of yellow paint and some primer. I scraped all the paint off (which was not difficult), sanded it all, applied a coat of primer and then finally I could get the yellow paint to stick. It still took a lot of coats to get a nice consistent colour. 

I added a bit of black ribbon (left over from the seat belts from the 1972 Ford Escort kit) to use as the straps for the spare wheel. 

I found this kit was missing a part, the pedals. I had a look in my bag of bits and found some left over pedals (I think from a Opel Manta 400) which were too big. So I trimmed them down to fit and I think this worked out fine. 

This kit came with photo etched seat belt buckles but nothing for the actual seat belts. So acting on some advice from an employee at my local model shop here I am using some 2mm masking tape painted red which I think works really well. 

 

This kit came with no decals for the interior and I couldn't find any decent reference photos for the interior so I just found what spare decals I had that looked vaguely plausible. I think these were from a Citroën Xsara WRC. 

 

At this point I realised this kit had the wrong wheels in it. These are the wheels are from the Monte Carlo Rally version not Rallye Catalunya but there was nothing I could do at this point. 

Getting the wheels aligned correctly withe the wheel arches was an absolute pain and I made a bit of a mess here but once the skid plate is on it should look fine. 

I would have liked to get the roll cage a bit smoother but it was so brittle I had already broken the pieces a couple of times that I didn't want to risk more sanding. Also I would have preferred to do another coat of yellow but I had run out of paint again. I had gone through an entire pot of yellow on the bodywork. 

 

I thought it would be easier to add the seat belts after the roll cage. I was wrong. 

Again without any interior reference photos I wasn't sure where to attach the seat belts so I chose here. 

This hole did not match the shape of the vent so I had to carve it a new one and fill in the gaps and repaint it. I also noticed the other vent was supposed to be attached to the top of the body work so I removed that too. 

 

I glued some foil to the back of the light to get a nice shiny backing. 

 

I noticed at this point that the wheels are a bit too wide for the body work. I think fixing this would take quite a lot of modifications to the suspension and I decided I'd rather not risk messing it up and just live with it. 

The window fit was not great I had the genius idea of heating up the plastic and pressing into place to mould to the exact shape. This went terribly When hot the plastic when completely flat and cooled too quickly to press it into place. So that is why the rear right window fits so badly. 

There were a few decals missing, most noticeably Dark Dog logo on the roof. So I wonder if this kit was supposed to have a second decal sheet included. 

I added a few aerials to add a bit more detail.  

 

I'm not sure what happened to the Italian flag decal. I definitely applied it to the car but at some later point it was gone so I had to carefully paint in the flag again. 

At this point I found the body didn't quite fit properly, it was resting on the roll cage. 

 

 

 

I sanded down the roll cage as much as I dared to get the body to fit again. It is really thin in places so I daren't sand it down any further. Once I get some more yellow paint I will touch up all the little bits that need work and finish this kit off. 

After getting some time to come back to this model. I looked that the fit of the body shell and still didn't think it would look good event with the sanded down roll cage. I decided it was worth the risk of picking it apart and trying again.  

Even after removing the roll cage the body shell still didn't quite sit right. I found it was due to the extra plastic I had left attached to the windscreen (which I thought would make it easier to glue) that was fouling the dash. So I trimmed that off. 

I successfully filed down the bottom of the roll cage until the body shell fitted nicely. 

Feeling flush with confidence after fixing the roll cage I decided the tackle poorly fitting wheels. 

I decided to start with fixing the rear wheels as they should hopefully be easier. 

The rear wheels turned out nicely and just took a little sanding and re-gluing.  

 

The front wheels were a little more difficult to fix. I had to cut this control arm type piece and sand a lot off the suspension components. I wasn't too fussed about how messy this part was as it will be covered by the skid plate. There was so much paint and resin dust after all the sanding pretty much everything was covered in it. 

There is still a little positive camber and projection out from the body work but overall I happy with this. 

After feeling really good about sorting the wheels, next morning I noticed this. one of the wheels was off the ground. 

Sorted. All the wheels finally on the ground. 

To get all the wheels on the ground I didn't fancy taking everything apart again and yet more sanding. So I just shifted this wheel to be slightly off centre. It looks a bit wrong but better then having one wheel off the ground 

Everything all painted up again. There was quite a lot of damage to the paint after fixing everything. 

All finally finished. I also had to replace one of the aerials which I broke whilst fixing the wheels.