Tamiya Fiat 500F 1/24. Part 4 - Interior

As the next part after the body preparation I went for interior. Starting with the door panels. They look quite poor out of the box. Especially confusing part is molded handles which look blurish and will create a challenge during painting since they in turn alsohave to be painted in different colors. The base color will be the same as the body - yellow Tamiya TS-16. For the upholstery I decided to go with Earth Brown acrylic color A.Mig-0064. It is very handy to use acrylic colors on top of the enamel, because it is very easy to fix imperfections after airbrush painting if there are any.

I decided to produce all interior handles from scratch using my laser cutter and a 0.15mm stainless steel sheet. First I had to take precise measurements of each handle for which I used electronic calipers. The next step is to decide how to construct these handles. Those with levers will be the same. The one on the top should have volume, so I will shave the original handle a bit and glue steel part on top of it. The volume for the spinning handles also should be created. So I decided to cut several circles for the base of the handle and for the actual handle and then paint them. Overall each handle will contain about 6 parts.

To prepare for attaching my scratch parts the moulded parts need to be shaved and removed. I fully removed the rotating handles and shaved a bit upper one. Then to een the surface I need to fill imperfections with putty before going with the primer. I will got with the same color scheme as the entire car - yellow border with earth brown center part.

I applied white primer. Fixed some imperfections and applied primer again. Then painter with the same yellow Tamiya TS-16 color as the body and to make it a little shiny coated the door panels with gloss varnish because the paint inside the car (on real prototype is the same glossy as from outside). And after that I painted the center part with acrylic earth brown. The assembly of metal scratch parts was quite easy and didn't bring any problems. The last step was to add some black accent liner to emphasize the gaps between door panels.

I made some experiments with the detailing of the gauges. Instead of painting the decorative circle around the speedometer I decided to make it either from the wire or laser cut it. I compared 2 versions. The one from wire will always have a joint, but laser cutted looks flat (cause it is flat). But after some sanding and polishing the latter one looks much better. So I decided to use laser cutted circle. To make the gauges even more realistic I used screen protective film on top to emulate the glass cover.

Finally I painted the gauges in gloss white, applied the decal. Protective film and metal circle were glued with acrylic water based gloss varnish to avoid any chemical reaction on such a small part and not leave any residues.

The next assignment for my laser was to cut seatbelt locks. I looked through my storage of photo etch parts and found very few seat belt locks, thus I decided to make a copy of them with my laser to have some spare for future builds.

The interior of the civil car wouldn't look busy and complete without the mats. There are many ways to produce them, but since the laser is my favourite tool to make upgrade parts it would have been shame hot to use it here as well. I took the measurements from interior and draw some simple mats. Then cut them out from 0.2 mm brass sheet.

But that was not enough. I cannot leave the mats as is. Either you need to paint them or... I found a better and faster way to turn them black. Burnishing liquid for brass. It takes just 5 minutes to turn brass to black. No priming, no painting... perfect solution. I used AK 174 and it worked very well.

One more thing to mention is the flocking of the interior. I used the super fine black flocking powder for nails which was glued with clear varnish and after drying painted with the same earth brown color. To have a good coverage over the black flock I had to spray several layers, like 3 or 4. But the result worth it.

Here is the final gallery for the completed interior of Fiat 500F

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