A Ferrari Like No Other.
the Hobby Design LB Works Ferrari F-430 resin trans kit.
While the title might not lend true nowadays with many iterations of the LB Works F-430 wide-body making it’s way into the market, it was a step far off from the norm in aftermarket design. Take a well balanced and great Italian sports car, an intuitive Japanese aftermarket manufacturer, and throw in some European flare. Hobby Design has captured every nuance and detail in this kit with a high level of accuracy. While this kit was provided to me free of charge by Hobby Design, it is imperative to know that I’m doing this without bias. All of the flaws or drawbacks associated with the kit will be brought forth so you know exactly what you are getting. As with most resin kits, you should consider their limitations and understand that experience working with resin or scale modelling in general is recommended and advised.
If you want to see the unboxing of the kit and what it contains, you can scroll to the bottom of this post and see for yourself, but moving through this post I will be guiding you through what I think of the kit in a more thoughtful and pictorial manner. So lets get started.
Assault On The Front
Being that the main focal point of the kit is the body, I’ll start the build by making the necessary cosmetic changes to the base kit. Speaking of which, the Hobby Design F-430 trans kit, henceforth referred to as HD F430, is intended to be used with the Fujimi 1/24 Ferrari F430 Coupe. The standard F-430 in other words. I’ve been told it can work with Revell’s F430 however there might be some additional fitment issues.
What I decided to do was use the Spyder offering from Fujimi instead. The end goal of this build is to encapsulate the older style Ferrari with neutral colors and chrome accents. So no Resale Red here.
Work began on the front bumper which consists of the front bumper and a chin spoiler. The faint bumper separation line is the guide line to cut. Caution and care should be taken around the headlights where they run closest to the bumper line. Less than a millimeter of plastic separates the headlight opening from the edge of the bumper.
Once that had been lobbed off, I took a coarse, flat sanding stick to the underside to smooth the line and get rid of plastic burrs from the cutting. This will also ensure a good bond with the plastic of the body and resin of the HD bumper using cyanoacrylate glue mixed with some denture resin for added strength.
The HD bumper has a small moulded in support strut that helps the resin keep shape over time and is a nice touch when you consider that the resin may warp overtime naturally and this helps keep everything in alignment.
Be cautious when removing this strut because it is attached to two alignment tabs that help fitment of the HD bumper to the body. Also of note to caution and care are the three small alignment “nipples” on the underside of the bumper which is used to fit the splitter on. I ended up breaking off one during assembly and while there is still 2 good mounting points, I wish HD had thought of a better way to make sure the splitter and bumper matched up than three tiny points.
After clean-up was corrected, the bumper was taped into place and checked for alignment. Safe to say that if you make your cut straight and your sand flat, the HD bumper drops snugly into place. The tape was really only there to make sure that any sudden movements or jarring of the workbench did not dislodge the bumper from the body while the glue set. For most large resin, I use a mix of dental acrylic powder and cyanoacrylate or CA glue to adhere the parts. Holds much better and provides a stronger bond in my opinion when I found out about it from Paul Budzik.
The front fender flares were next up on the list. I did find tat the resin had shrunk a bit, making the bottom ends of the pieces close in on each other. The resin was malleable enough that some slight pressure however could put the flare back to shape with some ease when gluing into place.
The cuts made to the kit body was straight forward. Find the top point of the wheel arch, make a straight, level cut to the door line, then follow the door line down to the side skirt and continuing that door-line down past the side skirt.
As previously mentioned, the shrinkage of the resin is apparent here with the gap left between the fender and the door quite apparent. Taking a long piece of tape and pulling the inner wheel arch in after the front of the fender is glued and taped in place solves this issue just fine. I would have liked HD to have put a better support piece in that area similarly to how they did on the front bumper to mitigate the resin shrinkage. Alas this is one of the issues when working with resin as a medium.
The rear fenders did not exhibit the same shrinkage issue as the front fenders did, but they did require a bit more surgery to fit.
The only rear tricky part of this whole install was the rear fenders. While you could just slap them on and call it a day, later on in the build you’ll see you should take the time to remove the inner fender wall now due to the camber of the rear wheels being so aggressive.
How I determined the amount to be removed was fairly simple. I clamped the fender into place, using the wheel arch to align placement. I then turned my desk lamp up to act as a table light so I could see the fender through the body. After marking what plastic could be removed, I removed the fender from the body and shone the light from the inside of the body to transfer the cut lines to the outside of the body. A time consuming process but accurate rather than gluing the fender into place and hacking out the excess out with a rotary, potentially causing damage.
Now I'm not entirely sure if the gas cap cutout alignment issue is due to shrinkage or due to the Spyder kit being different from the coupe version but you can see here that at least with my build, they do not match up. Aligning the fender cutout to the body location would have thrown off the alignment of the entire body leading to wonky proportions during final assembly and giving the model a canted look to one side.
And that ends it here for the body portion of the HD F-430. Now there are some side skirts that were not shown which I will add later on as they are far too delicate to install now. The kit does include a duck-tail type spoiler, but I decided to omit that from this build as I felt it would not accentuate the final design image in mind.
I hope you enjoyed this log, and we’ll see you in the next one.