Kit: No. 85504
Scale: 1/24
Manufacturer: Hasegawa, distributed by Marco Polo Import Inc., 532 S. Coralridge Place, City of Industry, CA 91746, &626-333-2328
Price: $14.98
Comments: Mixed media, 46 parts (28 injection-molded styrene, 12 cast metal, 4 photoetched metal, 2 vinyl tires, decals
Pros: Easy paint scheme – most of it is provided on excellent decal sheet, photoetched chain drive
Cons: Fit of driver, some assembly snags
Imagine going almost 200 mph, leaning to within a few inches of the ground, with only a leather suit between you and certain injury. Welcome to the world of Grand Prix motorcycle racing. No wonder it’s a young person’s sport!
Hasegawa recently has released several kits of GP class racing motorcycles in the popular 1/24 scale. Each kit features vinyl tires, cast white-metal fuel tank, photoetched metal parts, and colorful decals from Cartograf. The Yamaha YZR500 is in the markings of Norifumi “Norick” Abe of Team Rainey, who won the Japan GP in 1996 and was ranked seventh in the world in 1997.
The kit contains few parts and is easy to assemble, so the real challenge is in the painting and decaling. The only assembly I did before painting was to glue the halves of the driver’s body together. Fit was poor here, so I filled seams with super glue and used a grinding bit in a motor tool to work them down. The translucent white plastic makes it difficult to see flaws, so I shot on a coat of primer.
All of the rest of the parts were painted and decaled before I began assembly. The cowl is molded in clear, so I masked off the windscreen, sprayed on primer, cleaned up mold parting lines, then painted with Testor Acryl gloss black. All of the other parts that were primarily black were painted at the same time. The driver’s helmet, fuel tank, and front fender were painted gloss white, then I painted the forward upper part of the fuel tank and front fender Testor Acryl Guards Red, close to the red on the decal sheet. All of the parts that were to be decaled, including the figure, were dipped in Future floor polish and allowed to dry.
The decal sheet is impressive – seven colors and perfect registration. Don’t worry about finishing the driver figure – you need only paint the body black and the helmet white. All the suit’s and helmet’s designs and patches are decals. Walthers Solvaset softened the decals rapidly, which hugged the most complex compound curves. The position of some of the decals on the driver are not clearly shown in the instructions.
I started decaling the cowl by applying the decal closest to the windshield, but got it a little too high and discovered that the red stripe decal (No. 5) was not wide enough to cover the area between decal 1 and the main side panels (3,4). Do this: Install the red stripe first and then the other decals. I corrected mine by masking the red area when the decals were dry and spraying it with Guards Red.
The Michelin decals for the front tire (16) don’t match the curve of the tire; they’re a little too straight. The rest of the decals were added without any problems. When the decals were dry, I re-dipped all of the parts (except the driver body) in Future. To represent leather, I airbrushed the driver body Polly Scale semi-gloss clear.
Final assembly was easy, but a few problems cropped up. The instructions reversed the front and rear axle bolts – the long bolt should go on the rear. The front gear on the etched metal chain doesn’t attach to anything, so make sure it doesn’t interfere with bolting the front and rear frame members together. At this stage, I discovered the holes in the rear frame member (E1) did not go all of the way through, so I drilled them out. To attach the exhaust pipes (G10) to the underside of the fuel tank, I had to enlarge the hole in the pipes for the seat pin. The shock absorber spring (UB2) makes it hard to screw the fuel tank to the frame.
The finished model measures close to the specifications I found for the bike on the Internet. Photos of the bike show the black triangles just below the windshield and the rearmost red rectangle on body cowl should have soft edges.
I spent about 14 hours building my Yamaha, mostly painting and decaling. It’s a colorful, unusual, and tiny (only 31/2″ long) addition to my model collection.
– John Plzak