'79 Chevrolet Malibu 4D Sedan.

[Mr.409]

Thanks, and I agree that this type of color has always looked very good on these G-Bodies. The factory color looks like a bit of a mixture of Gold and Copper, so it's a bit darker than mine.

The paint I'm using are just the regular Maston Sprays that are available at the local hardware store. The Primer and paint itself should work with each other (They pretty much always do), but they have always worked well with different plastics and resins too. Don't know what caused the problem now, I guess it's just my typical (bad) luck... These are the paints that I usually use, these Maston paints are (usually) really good stuff, except their gloss white... So with white cars I use Tamiya.

[Mr.409]

Well I'm happy to say that I got the paint job fixed. After it was completely dry, I sanded it with 1,000 grit hoping that I won't go through the paint as then I would have to start all over again. Luckily that didn't happen so when the paint job looked smoother, I went back to the garage and sprayed another light coat of gold on the body. This time the result looks much better, so now I'll let it dry and then I'll shoot some clear on it...

[Mr.409]

Now I decided that the body had dried enough so that I could clear coat it. I sprayed two light coats, one kind of "almost-wet-coat" and then one wet coat of clear on it. I'm not sure if that's enough to be polished, but I need to try as I can't spray any more clear on the body or otherwise some of the smaller details and chrome trim will be hidden under the paint...

And of course as I finished shooting the clear, a couple pieces of dust landed to the hood and roof... Luckily polishing should take care of them.

[fordrodnkustom]

Looks good. The clear really pulled the tone of the color out.

[Mr.409]

My modeling has been a bit slow for a while but this year I've finally had a little more time to work on these things. It's also been a year since I've been on this great site, so I have a lot to catch up!

But, in the meanwhile, I finished this project earlier this year. And since I have the WIP thread here, I'll go ahead and update it so that the thread becomes "complete".

So, the body was clear coated in 2017 so in June 2024 I thought it's probably dry enough for polishing... Clear coat on the body was not as thick as I'd liked, but I had to be really careful not to lose all of the details under a clear coat. So, I had to be very careful with polishing, and not only because of that, but also because of the small 1/32 scale.

It turned out pretty good, though.







Wheels and tires are resin items by a Finnish resin company, AirTrax. They are originally meant for a tiny European or Japanese car in 1/24 or 1/25 scale, but they were the correct size for this Malibu. They're also better than the kit tires with raised letters and GM Rallye Wheels, because I wanted this to have kind of a "base model" look.
Wheels are painted gloss black by brush, tires are painted flat black, followed by a coat of flat clear from a spray can, dog dish hubcaps are machined out of aluminum.





Next up was doing the chrome trim with BMF. Window trims were easy, other molded in details like headlights, tail lights and especially the grille were quite tricky to get right. Especially the grille was very tricky to BMF cleanly, finally I was able to do it with a combination of BMF and some Molotow Chrome.






Next I black washed the grille with Tamiya's Panel Line Accent Color. Not perfect, but it's the best I could do. Headlights come as clear parts in the kit, otherwise all lights are painted over BMF.

[modelcarfan]

Doing the detail work on a 1/32 scale is a challenging one... especially with miniature size paint and tedious flow of painting. You did a great job. The paint on the body looks superb after its being glossed and my eye was confused with whether if its still wet or paint residue floating so I stick to the gloss part that controls how the paint looks after applied. This is a trick. Impressive work !