1/24 Benetton B186 F1
By John Zweber
In 1994, Wave did a series of kits in 1/24 called “Legends of Formula 1”. I’ve always liked the livery on the Benetton B186 from 1986, and this can be built as raced by either Gerhard Berger or Teo Fabi.
I got an incredible deal on the kit, but then I had to build it. The kit is resin and white metal. Lots of hot water and clamps are needed to get the body into some semblance of straight.
The upper body is one piece and the lower is 2 parts, which became 3 when I sectioned the part under the cockpit to allow assembling the seat and ancillary parts. This also allowed the lower pieces to more or less fit the upper body.
The front and rear wings are white metal. Super glue and epoxy don’t come close to holding the parts together, so I now know how to solder white metal. Thank God for the internet! I never knew there was such a thing as low heat solder.
After trying to straighten the white metal suspension parts, I decided to replace
some of them with brass and nickel silver rod from Albion Alloys. Fortunately, there were only a few tiny bubbles on the body to fill. I used Splash Paints 2K grey primer, Splash Brilliant White, Zero Benetton Green, and Splash 2K Clear. Then I applied the decals.
The colored decals were in amazingly good shape for being 25 years old. The white decals were not faded at all, but they were cracked. I finally applied some Microscale liquid decal film to hold them together. This was after trying to spell out Sisley on the side, in what turned out to be more like 40 pieces per side instead of 12.
After another couple coats of Splash 2K clear, I added some A/N fittings to the transmission, scratch-built the brake light from some leftover red sprue, epoxied the parts together, added a nice big bolt from RB motion to hold the rear wing on, and then I was done. Now it’s time for a Tamiya kit . . .
