This is what's commonly called a subscription kit. Each month, a pack of parts arrive. The resulting model is built up over time. The kit consists of 12 monthly deliveries. But for this one I took advantage of the company's jump start offer of 6 issues all at the beginning, so I completed this car in six months.
When I started this project, global shipping was at the beginnings of the chaos we still find today. But the shipments none the less arrived. A few ran late, but communication from Agora Models and the status was excellent. Shipments arrived well packaged, complete and in good condition.
The model itself is a 1965 Shelby Cobra, also known as an AC Cobra, specifically a Cobra Mk III S/C for semi-competition (the street version). Very few of these cars were originally made. This model kit was expensive, but significantly less than the $1.5 million or so a real example costs.
A car much like this was prominently driven by Matt Damon in the 2019 film "Ford vs. Ferrari".
So about 1:8 scale car kits...
There's apparently a cultural style to large scale car kits. They all appear to be similar in some ways, going all the way back to Pocher classic models of the 1970s.
These kits are designed to get a good result by assembly only, without paint or extra fabrication. They are sometimes called a step beyond Legos, and there is a grain of truth to this. Molded plastic parts for this Cobra arrive "ready to use". Only 2 or 3 small parts arrived on sprues. Plastic parts are all colored plastic, or prepainted. Many parts are metal, rubber or other material. Frankly I kind of wanting something that would yield a nice result without a lot of stress.
But a downside to this, to me, is that basically, almost all of the parts are either black molded plastic, black painted metal, silver painted plastic, or silver painted metal. There are a few details in gold or red. The trouble is that all the blacks and silvers are the same, completely monochrome shades over the entire model. To avoid this, I repainted almost everything, aside from the body and other large painted parts that I felt I could not do justice to. So, no, I couldn't just put it together and leave it at that.
These kits are unlike typical scale model kits in many other ways. For one, everything is held together with screws. I used glue only a handful of times. In theory, one could completely disassembly the car again and start over.
The level of detail in kits like this is a mixed bag. On the one hand, pretty much every element of the real car is included. On the other hand, the level of detail on parts is not exactly Wingnut Wings. Parts are a little simple and sometimes crude representations. That's a shame because at 1:8 scale, there's isn't much on a car model that too small to represent.
Of course on the other, other hand, at 1:8 scale it is pretty easy to greatly improve the look with even a small amount of effort, such as with painting of details. I don't know why 1:8 scale kit makers are so shy about glue, paint and more detailed polystyrene molding. I added several bolt head, some metal straps, fittings, and a handful of other parts. Someone so inclined could turn a kit like this into a masterpiece.
These kits tend to use ABS plastic, I think it is? I guess it works well on large parts. There was no warping at all, anyplace. The plastic is hard and strong, and it paints easily. Parts molded in black look painted. The color is highly saturated with no "transparent" appearance. In some cases, looking to get a variety of shades, I just sprayed the black plastic with a matte, semi-gloss or gloss clear. The plastic can be hard to glue. I did not use much glue, but when I did I ended up working for multiple types. CA glue was not always a good choice.
The model includes working steering and suspension, LED headlights and taillights, break lights light when the break petal is pressed, and the car makes a V8 engine sound when the accelerator is pressed.
I particularly like the suspension. It it will matched to the significant weight of the car. When you pick it up or put it down you can feel the springs giving just the right, realistic amount of support.
The engine sound is fun, but in my opinion, if you can't make it really roar, as this car should, effort might have been put on something else instead. The lights are good, but I should have substituted brighter headlights. You can get LEDs now that are the sort used in flashlights, really bright.
The car also has a working horn sound though. That's a nice touch.
The seats came in a form I have not seen before. They are a leather-like material over a foam layer that stretches over a plastic frame. It has a realistic look, and is "plush" to the touch. I feel it's a little out of scale though, and it is hard to get the right shape to the seat overall. My favorite way to do seats is still covering the plastic with leather as I did on my Eaglemoss DB5 model.
There is flocking-like material on the interior floor. It works well. I added black doll-house scale carpet to the truck interior.
The kit used the same hose material for the ignition wires. I substituted some read wire for that. My wire may be too small, but the kit wires were definitely too large and looked exactly like all the hoses (since it was).
A lot of stuff under the hood could benefit from a PE set, or just some simple fabrication that I didn't do.
Overall impressions...
The kit went together almost entirely easily. There were a handful, like 2 or 3, parts that did not fit well and had to be adjusted. The molding quality was good, but molded parts did have seam lines and showed where they were cut off a sprue. These artifacts were generally well hidden. But they were not a factor for me, I fixed them all and repainted the parts. There were a couple instances where the hole provided was simply not large enough for the needed screw, but I got through it, not a big problem. More importantly, all the holes lined up and all the pins were in the right places. Even after almost all the work, no errors compounded enough to prevent the entire body (all on piece) from fitting into place.
Some parts include printed details, such as text, like the gear layout on the knob of the gearshift. These details are completely crisp and add a lot to the model.
I think I counted two minor errors in the instruction, which are provided online as PDF files. In a couple places, the wrong screw was called for. It was easy to spot the error and see what to do instead.
Designers of kits like this like to play a few tricks on builders. There are parts they send at very early stages that you don't use until much later. Usually this is no problem, but for example, at a very early stage I added a bracing frame to the firewall on one side. On nearly the last stage, a corresponding brace gets added to the other side. This part was trivial to put in place at the early stage but adding the other one after the body was on the chassis and most of the hoses were in place in the engine bay was a road to near madness. Somewhere someone's having a laugh.
For some reason the steering does not work well on my model. I'm not sure what's going on there, but it seems the U-joints kink up or something and bind against the frame. I'm not going to worry about it.
The paint on the main body is outstanding and it's why I really like large scale kits like this. There's no way I could create a finish like the model has. When the body arrived and I opened the box, I got a little worried. You really don't want to mess it up. It was handled with extreme care. And again, for all the wishing there were more tiny details, at this scale, one tends to stand back a bit and take the whole thing in. And the body work just steals the show. It's flawless.
Find all of this project's posts here.
The whole photo album for this build is here.
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