Hi guys. Some months ago I mentioned that I was intending to re-work the old Stabocar Maserati shell. Here are a few photographs of how it looked originally and how it looks now. Hope you all like it.

Graham.

HelloGraham,
Very nice! Could you please give some more details about the changes and modifications you made?
Best regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas. Well to be fair the changes aren't that great. The original shell is pretty much spot on dimension wise. Being of German manufacture you would expect that. As you can see from the first photographs it suffered from shrinkage in numerous places with the bonnet area being the worst. Here it was more or less concave and needed building up with automotive filler. Before doing this however I copied the outline of the bonnet itself along with the fresh air ducts and bonnet scoop. Once the filler had been applied and the correct shape had been achieved the bonnet panel line was scribed in. If you look closely along the side of the car you can see the very vague line that runs the whole length. It's quite rounded in places but should have a very sharp definition. The side of the car were "keyed" with a rough abrasive allowing the filler to grip. Following the flatting of the filler I was then able to achieve the very distinctive line that is a feature of the fullsize car. Where it swoops down over the front wheel arches however, it becomes very subtle. Typically Italian. This still requires further work. The roof again was slightly concave and required building up a little in the same way. The wheel arches themselves were totally the wrong shape and again required work along with arch flares at the rear.
The original shell was obtained from Rudiger Marx in Essen who has quite a stock of Stabocar items. He sent me a not too brilliant example along with an interior, glazing and bumpers. Being plastic the bumpers required re-making. I did this with a combination of litho plate (10 thou aluminium used in the printing trade) and Chemical Metal filler. The litho plate was shaped in plan form to follow the profile of the bodyshell in the appropriate place, leaving a surplus to hold the piece. The chemical metal is then applied along the filed edge and shaped as required and the surplus aluminium then cut off.The advantages of this method are that the resulting piece will withstand vulcanising which is a process of taking a rubber mould at 160 degrees c at a pressure of around 7 tons to enable metal castings to be produced.The downside is that this vulcanising method will find every single air bubble in the filler and cause tiny imperfections. To get round this the piece is made slightly over size to allow filing down to the correct shape and size before the definitive piece is produced. Of course body mounting spigots have to be added and for this 1mm diameter rod was soldered in at the appropriate places. Still more finessing needed to get it absolutely spot on, but I think the elegance of the full size car is now starting to show. I'll be posting more as I progress.

Graham.

Hi Graham,

I love this car, are there new photographs of your model?

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Herzliche Grüße vom Niederrhein, Joachim