57 Ford Fairlane 500 Junker – Some Building Tips

Those who have been following us for a while now may know this build. In this post, I want to give you some new insights of this junk model car – so if I already told you about it, it is still worth it to read this post!

The scale model was inspired by a real car. My brother cut off the rear end one day and made a sofa out of it. The rest of the car remained on a yard. This was one of my first two junk model cars, so I was still looking for techniques back then. One of the things I knew, was to apply rust with the rust powder (you may know my guide on how to make rust by yourself). I still use that technique, but now I combine it with two other rust weathering techniques (two component rust and flat brown).

One of the special features of this build are the brake drums on the front. I scratch built them, which it took me some time. I used a very hard wire to make the bolts, which was a big mistake as it was awfully hard to cut in the size I needed. Nowadays I would use either a very thin plastic stick or very  soft wire. Sometimes it’s just better to take a second thought on the materials you want to use  before staring – I learned that as well

Speaking of special materials, I also wanted to make something special with the grille. The one that comes with the kit is pretty thick and you can’t see through it. I first thought I could sand the back of the grille. But I realized pretty fast that it would have been kind of tricky. So I made a mould with liquid latex (you basically apply the latex with a brush over the original part, layer by layer). The result was pretty good. I broke part of the grille, to make it look more “junky”. Although the final product looked great, I learned that two component silicon is much better than liquid latex while making moulds. The liquid latex I used dries in contact with the air. This means that the material shrinks a bit while drying. This was not a big deal with the grille, but it can make a bad result while casting parts. I tried to cast some rims with latex and the mould shrinked too much, that the final product was just too small to fill the tire. In contrast, two-component silicon dries only when mixing the two components and it doesn’t loose volume while drying (or at least not as much that you would notice).

To fill the mould, I used resin – which is also a two component material and dries due to the chemical reaction triggered after applying the second component. The mould was a once piece mould, so it was open on the top. I just had to pay attention not to put too much resin, so you can see through the grille (that was the whole point, right?). I used some bare metal foil to finish it.

This last pic shows an improvised junkyard diorama set up with our barn project.

I hope you liked it!

Tagged as: 1/24, 1/25, 1957 Ford Fairlane, barn find, barn scale model, choosing materials, Fairlane 500, resin cast, weathering