Each year while the 24 Hours of Le Mans is going on, hubby and I take part in our annual model building challenge, constructing an automobile model entirely within the 24 hour span of the race. This year, since we weren't able to get to Daytona for the Rolex 24, we did the same thing just for laughs.
The ratty pic above is of my entry in this year's competition, a Revellogram C5 Corvette that I bought for no particular reason many years ago. It had been on my pile of stuff to sell. But, for various reasons, none of the more appealing stuff in my stash really called to me. Okay, well, the Tamiya Porsche Boxster kit did, but once I got started, I realized I'd misplaced the instruction sheet. Okay, well, back to the Corvette kit instead.
This build seemed doomed almost from the start. First were the multiple primer coats, because I couldn't get a smooth coat that didn't have a blotch or a piece of dust in it, so I had to sand all that out and re-prime it multiple times. In between, I worked on the chassis and interior. That went reasonably well, until I tried airbrushing the seats a different color and found not only that the color wasn't as complementary as I'd thought, but the paint was also too thin. That's not to mention the adventures in assembling some of the trickier parts, including a rear suspension component that took flight and didn't turn up until I was cleaning up before bedtime.
The body continued to be its own adventure. After much agonizing, I decided to use a can of Tamiya's Racing Blue, a very dark metallic blue I'd bought for the FW24 kit I have upstairs. I liked the idea of using a Formula One color on a street car, and I love Tamiya's spray paints because they set up quickly and smoothly. I put a pretty good progression of coats on it Saturday night, and left it to set up overnight.
Things were going reasonably well until I looked for some pieces and couldn't find them. It turned out the kit was missing an entire runner of clear parts. The windows were there, as were some other things, but the kit was missing its taillights, rear marker lights, and a couple other clear parts. I don't know if the kit never had them, or if I lost them, or what. Regardless, rats. I tried to figure out what to do, since I was too far in to just throw in the towel. Besides, something inside me didn't want to give up, anyway.
Just before bedtime, I had a thought. Upstairs I had a kit of the C5R Corvette, the fifth-generation Corvette built as a racer for Daytona and Le Mans. On a hunch, I test fit one of the C5R's taillights on the stock C5R. It worked fine. I decided I'd thermoform new taillights for the C5 kit using a C5R taillight as a pattern. Simple enough.
Sunday morning dawned and the race coverage came back on, and after a bit I went back to work. That's when I realized that not only were there imperfections in the body's finish coat, but I'd missed a couple of recessed areas and some undercuts. So I sanded out the imperfections as best I could and re-shot the body. The second attempt was much better, but as I polished it, I got the hood a little too thinly coated. So it was one more shot of paint, just on the hood and front fenders. This one worked, and it polished out reasonably well, so I was happy.
By the time I had the body in shape, the race only had about an hour and a half to go. I had to hustle if I was going to make it. So I masked off all the stuff that needed to be painted on the window trim areas and such, and went to paint them black. That's when I remembered that I forgot to clean my airbrush's color cup the night before; sure enough, it had a solid coating of dried paint inside. While it soaked, I'd have to find another one. Okay, well, our airbrushes use the same color cups, so no hassle.
I was starting to think I would make it. Then I installed the windows. Windshield went in okay. The rear window...well, it was a little too close to some super glue I used to install some interior components a minute or two before, and within a moment or two there was a smoke ring crazed into the rear window. That's when I decided the model had beat me, and I put it aside to watch the last half-hour of the race. I didn't like how I was hurrying in the last stretch. I was disappointed, because it's the first of these three builds I've not completed by the end of the race, but by that point, it wasn't worth it. (Hubby, meanwhile, had completed a gorgeous build of a Toyota Celica from a Tamiya kit.)
The race ended. I folded laundry after it was over. My stuff was still set up on the kitchen table. And I started to think about how I'd thrown in the towel. We'd just spent the last day watching a race that's all about endurance, where the success goes to the people who don't give up even when things go wrong. You routinely see teams a hundred or more laps down, long out of contention, but they'll bring their cars in, patch them up and change stuff out, and get back out there. Because, you see, merely finishing a 24-hour race is an achievement in itself. As long as your car can start and its engine can send power to four rolling wheels, you're not out of it. We have pictures taken at past Rolex 24s of cars missing all manner of body components, looking beat to kingdom come, but they were still out there when the checkered flag flew, plugging away.
And that got in my head. Why not? So I sat down and started to work, fixing the things that bothered me. I got some thermoform plastic and smash-formed the missing taillights. I popped out the crazed rear window, used my polishing kit on it, and got rid of the smoke ring. I fixed as many of the little things as I could. And I got it finished. There are a few touch-ups I have yet to do, but that little model is, for all intents and purposes, finished.
It gives me some hope that I did this. If there's one quality I really like about myself, it's that I never completely give up. Yes, there are times when I get really down and out and feel hopeless, but those tend to be short; most of the time, my mind is working, itching to get back into the fight so I can knock the problem into submission. I don't like it when problems win. I'm one of those people who has that test pilot mentality: when other people are going "Oh, no! I've only got ten seconds before I crash!", I'm saying to myself, "Hey, I got ten seconds! I bet I can save this thing!" And that's how it was here. Maybe I missed the end-of-race deadline for the project. But the only disgrace would have been if I had put the model back in the box, taken it back upstairs, and put it back on the shelf as a failure. Instead, I have a pretty nice little model -- not perfect, but not bad, either -- and a lesson from it.
Oh, and if all goes well, next year's Rolex 24 will be with us once again in the stands. (Though I seriously doubt we'll bring model kits to build as the race is going on.)