McLaren M6A Project - Page 2

Remember, this project started as an exercise to see if we could produce something that could be displayed in the same room with the extraordinary High Tech Modelle Lola T-70 (shown on previous page in Stage 2). As you can see from all the photos on the previous page and below, it started out with considerable optimism and belief that we could make something out of it! It has been referred to as "soap carving" at one early stage but we are slowly making progress!

Click On Any Image Below For Larger View

Stage 6 - Castings!

Well, we received our preliminary sample castings and continued the contouring of the body. We shaped some styrene to the correct profile for the tub side that is the white part for the chassis in these photos.

At this point we were feeling pretty smug and pleased with ourselves...briefly!

Stage 7 - OOPS!

As we were working on this project and started comparing our rough resin castings to photos there was something that seemed amiss. We worked long and hard on the body shown in Stage 6 above. We did get a bit overzealous and took too much "meat" off the front corners and decided the side intake vent profile just wasn't right so we made the decision to start on another casting. We started on the second casting and decided to check some measurements and, lo and behold, the proportions were OFF!!! Turns out the wheelbase and overall length measurements are right on the money but the cockpit turned out to be .060" too long and the engine bay turned out to be .060" too short!!! No wonder there always seemed to be something "not quite right" about this little deal! The set of photos above show the splice in the engine bay before any significant smoothing has been done and if you look closely you can see where the cockpit area has been "sectioned" to remove the extra space. You should be able to see the differences in the two versions in the photos above and the large photos they're linked to!

Stage 8 - More Progress

As the photos above show, we've made some significant progress since the last series of photos on the tail section. This has been another bout of "fits and starts" as we used trial and error as our main guide!