Attaching the engine

Today is the big day: the monocoque will be joined forever with the engine, until death, or a cat, does them part... The operation was not straightforward. Without the bottom black tubes, the engine fits quite easily: the bracket slide in and the engine is put into place thanks to one plug on each cylinder bank. With the tubes, nothing moves, so I have to widen the holes at the bottom of the rear bulkhead in order to give more room to them. Nothing is quite rosy though, as the engine seems to be tilted upward at the rear...

Roll bars

I am about to end the building of the Lotus quite soon, or so I guess. There is not much paint job left, and lots of assembling to do. I put the roll bars in their place but had a bad surprise. The front bar does not fit the model at all! Its left hand attachment point is completely out of the body of the model, and looks weird (see picture). There is not much I can do about that except replace the bars, but I have no material at hand, nor talent enough to do so.

Tyres

The tyres provided in the kit are made of soft rubber. It is still stiff enough to stay firmly in place when the tyres are fitted on the rims. I am not sure whether they are true to the real tyres, I simply have not enough documentation. There are pictures from 1967 showing no side markings, markings outside and inside, whitish markings and golden ones... I have not found any proof of the "F" logo, or at least of a highlited one. So it will be kept free of paint. Another weird detail: one side of the front tyres have "Fireston" with a missing e... The main "Firestone" and circle are painted ochre #15 (Andrea Color). They look golden on pictures, but gold paint looks always bogus on a model, except for metal parts. For obvious reasons, the metal particles in the paint are not scaled down, so it looks somewhat off. The ochre paint will have a better finish, especially on pictures. It is hard to paint accurately, so every area where the brush went a bit too wide was cleaned up with a toothpick. Unfortunately, that means that the paint does not adhere to the ruber that well either and will be vulnerable later.

Wheels

The spokes of the rims are in chromed plastic too but I am no fan of that at all, especially because the real spokes are not chromed. I painted them semi-gloss black but left the rest of the rim in all its blingy glory. The overall paint was sprayed, but the sides were touched up by brush. It is highly unlikely that it will be spotted out once assembled. In order to highlight some details, I painted the nut assembly chrome silver, then titanium gold for the washer and titanium silver for the threaded end. Due to the poor covering of those titanium paints, I would advise to paint a metallic undercoat to get a better looking visual impact.
Both parts of the rim were then glued together and finally the brake rotors are attached.

Brake rotors

The brake rotors are painted boltgun metal. On every colour picture I have seen from the cars in 1967, the rim of the disks were fairly rusted (due to heat probably), so that was painted Tin Bitz.

Front wheel hubs, part 1

Like the rear hubs, the front ones are painted semi-gloss black. The brake stirrups are painted chrome silver and enhanced with boltgun metal. I want them to look like they are made of different parts.