Protar 1:9 1969 Bennelli 250cc 4c Motorcycle

I find the 60's racing motorcycles fascinating and when I found this model at E-bay to a decent price I did not hesitate to buy it. It is a model of the 1969 World Championship bike and Protar sells it as a "Junior" model with easy assembling. However I found out that not much was easy when building this model :-(

The kit is from the early 70's and rather coarse with heavy mould lines and mould misalignment on many small parts. The building instructions (in 4 languages) is very confusing and certainly NOT for Junior modellers :-(

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I began building the motor and frame, adding the front assembly. The motor is a very close fit and must be mounted before the chassis frame is fully assembled.

I painted the body parts silver as per kit instructions

  

I stripped the crome of the wheels and scraped off the mould seams to make the spokes thinner. I then painted the wheels with a thin layer of gloss black and finished with Alclad chrome. Wheel hubs were painted in dark Testors Metallizer 

The picture is found on the web

The decals in the kit is dry rub-on decals which cracked on application :-(
I therefore decided to make my own decals and base the model on the 1969 Pasolini bike shown in the picture above.
I therefore had to paint part of the body parts a (home-mixed) light green metallic.

I designed the new decals with Coreldraw and printed them combining laser and ALPS print, using the ALPS for white bottom layers and gold metallic print and the Laser for the actual colour prints.

The Benelli Lion in gold on the tank 

Work is progressing in spite of many setbacks. The plastic used for the kit was very brittle and many parts broke off when handling which was very annoying.
There was thick plastic tube in the kit for ignition cables and and brake cables tec and I replaced most with thinner tubes from thin electric wire.

Despite all the problems, the bike turned out alright. I did not make much additional detailing and the finish is not perfect, but frankly I got pissed with the kit and just wanted to get it off my table - so here it is :-)

Niels Elmholt, Juli 2015

I found this wonderful driver figure - can't remember the company name, but it was not very costly and looks great :-)
I used Vallejo paints and wash to finish him

Niels, Jan 2016

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