Started June 2000.
Bodywork
The building started with assembly and painting of the bodywork and the wheels. The tank and fairing was painted with Modeler's Bright red laquer (from a spray can) and the wheels and rear cowling were painted with Tamiya X-18 acrylic. Both colours was applied with an airbrush. 3 weeks later I polished the red bits lightly with camauba wax and applied the decals.

Adding some details...
There's many ways to enhance this kit by adding some details, so first I armoured myself with a pin vise and a scalpel in order to remove some excess plastic. The bracket that holds the rear brake caliper and the bracket that supports the stand on the right side of the rear swing are not supposed to be solid, so I "hollowed them out" in lack of a better description. The same went for the brake pedal and the gear change pedal. The footpeg brackets as well as the rear brake disc has a few holes that were drilled out, and I also drilled holes in the chain tensioners in order to insert wires that looks like tension bolts. Most of these details has been overlooked in the kits I've seen, so I'm excited about this added realism. The pics I've included are very small files and intended as a rough illustration. I also did things like adding small pieces of wire to the throttle "tubing" at the handlebar to simulate metal tubes.
The brake bracket The frame
The gearchange The rear swing

Painting.
Having one YZR model done already (the Red Bull) I knew a bit about the colour scheme on this bike, but this time I want to get a better result than what I acheived on the Red Bull, and the painting also reflects this. The instruction tells You to paint X-18 semi gloss black all over the place, but a bit of variation gets a result thats so much rewarding and life-like. I choose to paint the wheels and the rear cowling with Tamiya X-18 acrylic, the rear swing and frame with Badger engine black acrylic and the front forks with Testors Black Chrome. For the air intakes, the rear mudguard and several smaller parts I used Scale Motorsports carbon-fibre decal in 1/20 scale, simply because 1/12 cf decal didn't look right in my opinion.
A lot of metalizers was used on the engine, cooling and brake components, and I used clear colours over a silver base to acheive anodised finishes on the red 2D boxes (wich are data-logging devices) and the blue front fork adjustment nuts. The sliding part of the front fork was covered with bare-metal foil and then sprayed with clear yellow too give it a golden chrome look. Norick Abe prefers a tinted windscreen so I sprayed it with Tamiya X-19 (smoke) on the inside wich didn't look too bad.
The kit was finished on July 27, and I now has completed my first year of scale modeling. Here's the pics:

This page was last updated on 07/27/00.