Marmon Sixteen by Brooklin

[Jean B.]

Ladies (?) and Gentlemen, time to start a new engine! Christmas is over, and I'll return to my main collecting subject, the Grand Luxury Cars of the 1930s. This time the elegant Marmon Sixteen Coupé made by Brooklin. At the first sight no very exciting car, but if you have a closer look, you discover that the design mainly follows modernistic Bauhaus influences, which make the car exceptional, not only for its gigantic 16-cylinder engine. This engine was the predecessor of the Cadillac V16, as Marmon started its development first, then got into financial troubles thus loosing its engineers leaving for Cadillac, where they finished the V16-project...

Nicely made Brooklin model:









A hot tub is the best thing at this time of the year:

[Tom]

Looking forward to what the resident artisan can craft from this model...

[JSB33]

I think its a very handsome car and one whale of a base for your next masterpiece.

[Jager]

Another interesting subject Jean. The bonnet doesn't look long enough to hold a V16, though obviously it did. Would be nice if there was a way to show the engine.

[Paulius43]

The phrase "Nicely made Brooklin model" will soon get into "toy car" compared to the handcrafted masterpiece by Jean!
Looking forward to the improvements!

[Jean B.]

Hello guys, thanks for joining, I'm glad to hear from you again Let's see what I have done by now...

The baseplate was much too narrow for the bodywork, so I soldered some brass strips onto the sides to fill in the gaps:



Looks much better now:


The side vents were made very elaborated with a rim outside, but do not correspond to the original car at all :



... so as a first step I filed them off and will photo-etch a template with which I will scribe the vents into the hood (later...):



Brooklin offers the kind service to supply single parts for almost any car ever produced by them. As I'm always keen on disc wheels I ordered the ones which were made especially for the collector's version of this Marmon. However, disc wheels made by Brooklin are always slightly "egg-shaped"...


So I coated the wheels with metal putty...



... and used my motor tool as a "mini-lathe", to get perfectly round outside edges:

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[Tom]

As usual, nice start, This will look a lot more realistic when you're done.
.

[Jean B.]

As usual, nice start, This will look a lot more realistic when you're done.
.

At least I hope so...

Making the interior door panels:

Brooklin made some "piped relief" for the interior door panels, but of course I want to have it a little bit more accurate. Original condition:



Milled off roughly:



1mm polystyrol sheet cut into the shape of the door and covered with a good portion of polyester putty, pressed onto the door:



When the putty starts to harden, it es easy to remove the excess from the outside line. The same for the window:



When fully dry, the polystyrol can simply be removed (doesn't stick to the putty), the window lines carefully filed, and you have a perfectly even and smooth base for making fine door panels and windows, which will perfectly fit into the bodywork! The door template is painted black to scribe the window cutout with a needle into. Then it will be scanned and processed in my graphic programm (InkScape) to get a pattern for photo-etching:



The black parts of the car are not painted - as usual -, but black-chromed! To be honest, I really hate chromed parts, as they always do this without removing the ridges of the white-metal parts before chroming...



After honing down:



Enough for today...

[Tom]

I love the way you devise ways to make templates and to improve stock parts. Have you ever spent a lot of time trying to improve an existing part only to dump it and restart from scratch? I did that all the time when I was building kits...

[Jean B.]

I love the way you devise ways to make templates and to improve stock parts. Have you ever spent a lot of time trying to improve an existing part only to dump it and restart from scratch? I did that all the time when I was building kits...

Boy, you can bet I don't dare to think of the hours and days spending with standard parts and finally dumping them, thinking "why haven't you made a new part from scratch from the beginning???" Well, I guess that's model-building...

Radiator with cutouts at the sides where the Brooklin headlights were attached:



Filled with solder:



Two holes drilled to put thin wires into, going to the front fenders:



The original dashboard:



And the "cleaned" one, ready for photo-etched instruments:



And finally I began to polish the chromed parts. That's a work for feebleminded (found this term on google ). The hard-chroming is always a little bit rough, and the ridges from metal-casting were not smoothened before chroming. The difficulty is, that the hard-chroming is harder than the white-metal, so it is a silly work to hone the chroming down . The effect is hardly to be seen on the photos, but actually it really does make a difference:



(newly made in front, original one behind)

Happy New Year (imagine me singing Auld Lang Syne )

[Jean B.]

The headlights (they are indeed oval-shaped!) were cut off their original support, milled out and placed with a wire onto the fenders:



...and the taillights were also milled out:

[DeadCanDanceR]

Oh boy...this is going to be an interesting thread!

[stewil]

Glad to see you are at it again Jean.
Much appreciate seeing your tools and methods as you progress through to the final result.

[Jean B.]

Oh boy...this is going to be an interesting thread!

I'm always happy if I don't bore you with all my tinkering...

Glad to see you are at it again Jean. Much appreciate seeing your tools and methods as you progress through to the final result.

And I can assure, it's an adventure for myself all the time...

I've decided to cast the tires in resin by myself, here's the first example:



And milled out and put onto the rim:



Of course I'll paint white-walls, but I'm still testing different techniques...

[Jean B.]

Going ahead with the white-wall tires:

This is the one with a white-wall painted by hand, using a turning table:



This one is masked first:



.... and then airbrushed matte-white:



I'm curious how this will turn out...

And meanwhile I've started designing the photo-etched parts:

[gilma]

Great pleasure to see another project Jean. I love the current "patient", and looking forward to your treatment
I'm tempted to ask what colors will you choose, but I'll patiently wait...

[Tom]

The white on those whitewalls looks a lot more realistic than on most models... it's often too bright and shiny.

[Jean B.]

Great pleasure to see another project Jean. I love the current "patient", and looking forward to your treatment
I'm tempted to ask what colors will you choose, but I'll patiently wait...

Well, I fear you'll have to wait, as I'm not absolutely sure yet... At least I can say that I prefer a one-colour painting for this "clean" and modern design. The surviving original cars with two and three-tone paintings look terrible "fancy", in my opinion. But: either colour it will get, I guess it will be a controversial shade

The white on those whitewalls looks a lot more realistic than on most models... it's often too bright and shiny.

I've meanwhile decided to paint the white-walls by hand, the edge between white and black doesn't get that accurate with airbrushing than I hoped it would... And yes, most of the ready-made white-wall tires look awful, the main problem is that they mostly use rubber tires, and there is hardly any way to get really matte and white paint on soft tires. There's a reason that in reality white rubber is vulcanised onto black tires, and no paint is used...

At the moment I hardly find any time for model-building Having got my new lathe, I now face the problem that I have to tidy up and re-organize the whole cellar, and that's a work which crushes the strongest man...

At least I found a couple of minutes to continue with the tires:

After having painted the first two ones, I need some fine rings to enhance the look of the wheels. First I take 0.6mm silver wire and bend it very tightly around a 10.5mm drill:



Cut off:



Carefully flatten the ring and bring its ends together:



Dip into AlClad Aqua Gloss to protect the surface against stains:



...and glue onto the wheels:



In my eyes this give a nice "realistic" depth to the wheels (the center of the hubcaps is already milled out and will be covered by photo-etched ones).

[Tom]

What an attention to detail, and it works great!

[Jean B.]

What an attention to detail, and it works great!

Thanks! - And yes, I'm back again There were some very busy days making model building impossible... And you wouldn't believe what was necessary to fix the wheels to the Marmon ! As the axles had not the appropriate width, I had to cut them into, and every experiment to deal with the parts, led to hundreds and thousands of new difficulties...

However, I found a way and as a test I fixed the wheels to see if it works, and it does:





Guess the knot has burst and I can rev up now

[Jager]

I'm a great fan of your work Jean, but shouldn't the wheels be bigger ?

[Jean B.]

I'm a great fan of your work Jean, but shouldn't the wheels be bigger ?

Well, I tried slightly bigger wheels, but when they fit properly into the front wings, they are too big for the rear wings, and furthermore they are much too big compared to the spare wheels... So when rebuilding existing models, you simply have to make compromises concerning the "hardware" you've got from the manufacturer...

For today, I've made the layout for the photo-etched parts:



Hope to get the parts ready tomorrow

[Tom]

It's always a treat to see you prep for etching. That is one efficient layout!

[Jean B.]

It's always a treat to see you prep for etching. That is one efficient layout!

...well, at least after having forgotten one piece and another, every time doing the arrangement again

Printing on transparent foil, x 2 for each side to intense the black areas, otherwise the UV-light would go through and the metal sheet would be burnished:



Such a light table is a really great thing for those works!

Having fixed the two sheets for each side:



And finally put the two halves together:



And the result:



Despite having used fresh etching solution and cared for excellent conditions, this time the result is not perfect, but - however - when examining every single part, almost everything can be used