Eaglemoss 1:8 Scale Aston Martin DB5, Part 21

It's really coming together at this point. Here's the front end of the body assembled as a unit, with the hood, lights, grill and bumper installed.

The interior is also assemble from previous subassemblies. Both seat are now in place with the dash and the rear seat. The passenger side ejection seat does work, but getting it latches back down is extremely difficult. I think I will leave it as is.

Next the interior assemble is put together with the front end, engine bay and finally the engine. It's been a long time since I had the engine out. It turned out pretty well!

Up to this point the assemblies went smoothly, but here some trouble began. The next step was to install the roof and read body onto the chassis, which now includes the interior and engine.

The fit was very poor. The body parts and frame are all metal (aluminium?) without much give. It just would not sit all the way down. I ended up disassembling some of what I had already done to determine that my leather was not adding additional thickness in the wrong place and causing trouble. Fortunately, that was not the trouble. The fit was just as bad with almost everything removed.

Note to self... If I ever build another one of these (I won't), test fit the major body pieces and frame all by themselves as soon as possible, with no additional assemble done.

I believe the posts in the body and the holes in the frame were not lining up. The post hit the outside edge of the hole and just stopped. It could not then line up and go down so a screw could hold.

I ground wider the holes, and rounded over the posts. The two could then begin to get seated correctly and the body could be forced down. And I do mean forced. The post could start to enter the holes, but getting the body to side down took A LOT of force.

Here is the grinding that allowed the post to get started in the hole.

Note the misalignment. That side rocker panel is part of the frame. The rear wheel well part of the body has to come down to line up.

Getting this together was just a matter of squeezing the rear body section down - hard - and getting screws in to hold it.

A managed to get it to within about .5mm on one side, and just about perfect on the other.

This model goes together strangely at the end. At this point the rear body and roof are on the frame, with the engine and front wheels, but no rear wheels or doors.

During this process I should note that I also connected power and tested all the electrical stuff except for the headlights. It all worked!

Here's the rat's nest of wires under the car. This will ultimately all be hidden.

There's not really enough light behind the dash but you can just see the glow of the instruments. The tracking display is also lit up. It looks great!

The car is big, really big. 

See all the posts for this project here:

https://jsexton0.blogspot.com/search/label/DB5