The tires are molded onto the wheels so that can be a pain to paint as no wheel masks are provided in the kit…Guys, the engine bay is a delight! it’s like a separate little kit all in of itself and it was so much fun to paint that gorgeous L-71 Detroit Diesel, the transmission is there, air filters, radiator, and all sorts of little gadgets like fuel filters and pumps etc…there is a lot of information available to detail this thing and color everything the way it should be painted…mounting it on the bus should be one of the last steps when putting everything together…I learned that the best way is to build it paint it then glue it to the support/engine mount parts, THEN at that point once the firewall and all that stuff is painted you can glue everything together then and then if you want to add even more cables and wires etc you can take it up another couple notches…I left he rear doors removable and even tho they open independently in real life, I decided to glue the three parts together and just snap them on and snap them off when you want to see the engine compartment…
I can’t recommend this model enough, it’s an impressive model once it’s complete, I do recommend that it is displayed with a simple yet elegant jig in the middle to keep it off of it’s wheels, think like those bases that guys build to display their airplanes in flight…that’s something that I plan to build for mine that I didn’t have time to do for the commission. either way I still plan to reinforce the heck out for he connection points to the wheels…I have my own on order now and will hopefully build that within the next year before I forget everything I learned from the first build…
I’ll probably post some images of that one once I get that project going…