SPA Modeler

speedgraflex wrote:10ish Eastern Standard Time... I hope you are feeling better!!!

Louisiana is on Central Standard Time... he’s two hours ahead of us

***POSTIMG IS BEING SQUIRRELLY AGAIN, APPARENTLY***

made a rudimentary prototype seatbelt out of Tamiya tape and the freshness seal from a coffee can:





It sucks in comparison to aftermarket harnesses I’ve seen. But I’m temporarily broke at the moment, so...

My firing solution for the shoulder belts. The fact that you are taking on building your own belts is great. Underlined. Underscored. I may not know your time zone but I do know how building your own belts makes me feel: good. You didn’t lay out what steps you took but I do feel you are not entirely happy. Maybe you are happy, if so, hit the paint... but I will drop a sketch because when I tackle this beast in 1/32 this will help me understand things a little. Also Post Image seems OK.



EDITED * more useful *

I suppose for a first crack at it, they’re okay. But yeah, I’m not happy with them. I tried using the seal material, as well as the material from one of those purée packs my like, wasn’t particularly happy working with that stuff. So I selected Tamiya tape instead.

Thank you for the sketch. I appreciate that a lot. I’m gonna take another swing at it later on probably. If I’m feeling into it. I’m exhausted. I didn’t get much sleep last night because of this cold and various other things which are stressing me out.

You can do this. Just take a break. I can feel your stress. Rest, heal and arise tomorrow a new man. Drink a ton of water.

PS. The reason I did just the shoulder belts and not the lap belt area is I think it would be easy to use a photocopy of the decal there because perspective flattens out so much anyway. You could build lap belts as well.

A simple fix is to apply the kit decal to some paper in order to give the decal a bit of depth. Then glue it in place.
But if you’re going to build your own harness, thin wire is the best choice to replicate the buckle hardware.

Stikpusher wrote:A simple fix is to apply the kit decal to some paper in order to give the decal a bit of depth. Then glue it in place.
But if you’re going to build your own harness, thin wire is the best choice to replicate the buckle hardware.

I found a piece of coaxial cable in the laundry room which I cut open and dissected:



The wire inside is quite malleable, and the gauge looks about right for this scale. I’d been messing around with staples earlier and was unhappy with the results. Here’s the Mk.II version of the prototype which I worked on a little bit after dinner:

Something I just read of a few days ago- use needle files as your guide to bend the shapes around, that will give you consistent size and shape: triangular, round, rectangular, and square...