Small parts.

The GT is now starting to appear as I want it to. The art that was put into the original car is not easy to replicate. All the major styling points can be included, but without that arty ingredient the model will look almost but not quite there. I've been messing around with this one for getting on for five years now, so I guess it's about time it was finished. As it's my personal favourite of all the DB Astons, there'll be an extra bit of finnessing. The photo above shows the patterns for the rear lamp lenses. I was introduced to pearwood some months ago, but never really did anything with it. But the delights of pearwood are now obvious. It carves easily and has a close and very consistent grain giving a finish way above anything else i've used. The lenses themselves are approximately 7.5 mm high by a shade over 2 mm wide. There is a horizontal cut around halfway up that hopefully will take photo etched trim piece. The particular small part may be pushing things a bit far. We'll see how it turns out.

The glazing formers shown above were made from pearwood too. These have had only handwork with 320 grade wet and dry apart from the single cutline at the B post point. The part on the extreme left is the second of the two tail lamp lenses. The final shaping and detailing takes place before the piece is cut off and trimmed. My next step is to experiment with clear casting resins adding a touch of red pigment. This particular process is very wasteful of materials as the smallest amount of resin I can mix accurately is 25ml. Of this i'll probably use 0.001% and throw the rest away.

The shot above shows just how the GT is now looking. Sometimes when I look at it and see something that just isn't right, I can't quite work out why or where. With everything in place around the front and looking very balanced, from one or two angles it still didn't do it for me. I found it eventually and added 1 mm to the top of the screen extending the headrail forward. The difference is quite amazing.

Graham.