Finished* Ferrari F430 Scuderia

**Dino Scuderia** · 28th July 2008, 12:22

This is Fujimi's new kit of one of my favorite cars. I never liked the 430 styling much...the 'shark' openings in the front looked great on the race version but not on the road car IMO. Then comes the Scud with the new shaped front grilles and a very racy rear design which I love and one of the coolest interiors ever.

On to the kit.

Fujimi did a good job capturing the Scud vs 430 differences although as mentioned on AF previously the side skirts are a bit too short, to remedy this I clipped a couple part number tabs from a sprue and glued then flat against the front of the skirts to extend them. Next I sanded them to the correct length and molded them in with superglue. I didn't do such a great job in that process which is actually easy to do...but I'm less focused in my building these days for some reason. There are separate parts for the front side heat extractors I glued in then molded in.

Another part that needs correcting to replicate the Scud is the rear window. The Scud does not have defroster elements embedded in the glass so I suppose there are two options to fix this. One is to sand the defroster off the kit 'glass' then polish it out, or the method I used which was to use the kit window as a template then cut a new one from acetate. Not too hard to do although you might have to make 2-3 until you get the fit acceptable. Fujimi's adhesive on their window mask is strong enough to lift a piano so I couldn't use it on the fragile acetate. To get your black trim on it I used a marker around the edges.

Also as previously mentioned the window masks Fujimi provides are not pre-cut so you have to cut along the lines they printed on the material as accurate as you can...and their adhesive is so aggressive if you have to lift off to reposition any of the masks it stretches them out shape terribly.

The interior is fantastic and includes some of the best looking seats ever in a kit. The interior is like a model unto itself...the real car has carbon fiber throughout(as well as the engine bay) so you can learn to master CF decals or take the easy way out like I did. I did a lot of experimenting with trying to get a CF look with various painting methods. One process I like a lot is to spray Testors lacquer spray window tinting(which is black unlike Tamiya's Smoke) over metalizers and/or metallic silver or grays. You can use different base coat colors to get the tint you need for the other base colors you are using on the body and interior etc. My car is painted with Grigio Titanio which is a bluish tinted metallic gray so my base metalizer was Anodonic Gray which is on the cool end of the color spectrum. The more coats of window tint you apply the darker your parts will get...don't get them so dark that you can't see the base metallics reflecting through. The main interior color is a mix of some Acryl blues and gray.

The Cobra Colors Grigio Titanio on the body was top coated with TS13 and polished. I did not clear over the stripes as they are on the real car but they look fine. The front ones are barely long enough but I had to shorten the roof and rear stripes a bit. I put a strip of 1/8" wide tape beginning on top of the location for the front Ferrari emblem(used as the center of the car) then across the roof and to the rear of the car. I lined the tape up as good as I could in the center of the body and used it as a guide to get my stripes spaced correctly and straight. The Scud has a Ferrari script just below the rear window so on the model it has to go over the stripes. If you do not clear over the stripes it's difficult to get a good script on the car..by that I mean a transfer would be preferable but because they have adhesive on them you can't press them on the pull the backing off without pulling off the stripes. I tried removing the backing form the transfer and then sticking it on but the transfer is too fragile to be handled in this manner. I ended up using a photo etched script there.

All Scuds have CF side mirrors, I did mine body color.

I painted the rims with Gunze Stainless lacquer metalizer and put a MSM peel and stick emblem in the center, their emblems were also used on the body. The calipers are painted with TS16 and are a very fiddly part of the kit. The disc are Coated with Testors Gunmetal metalizer which I also used on all the body grille meshes. The real car used a darkish gray color for the grilles. I used the metalizer because the metallic in it gives it a nice 'mesh' effect...especially on the rear lower grille which is noe an open mesh part. I cut the rear upper grille out and replaced it with Tamiya's mesh material which was also sprayed with the Gunmetal metalizer to match. Cutting the upper grille open is very worthwhile though it takes a bit of time it's a great effect on the model.