Barry Lloyd
Designer
Barry Lloyd is a Vanwall racing car enthusiast and in that capacity knew that there was a Vanwall that had not been modelled. He decided to put the matter right and produce a small run to satisfy himself and a few other enthusiasts besides
Mikansue made their Vanwall Special kit with the surface radiator in 1979/1980. Barry bought one, (still unmade...!) and thought it would make a reasonable basis for the second version with the scoop over the radiator tubes. He thought about it for so long that Mikansue had stopped making the kits, but luckily RAE took them on. So, he decided to have a go, and bought 6 RAE kits.
Subject ID: 81389
MoreBarry Lloyd is a Vanwall racing car enthusiast and in that capacity knew that there was a Vanwall that had not been modelled. He decided to put the matter right and produce a small run to satisfy himself and a few other enthusiasts besides
Mikansue made their Vanwall Special kit with the surface radiator in 1979/1980. Barry bought one, (still unmade...!) and thought it would make a reasonable basis for the second version with the scoop over the radiator tubes. He thought about it for so long that Mikansue had stopped making the kits, but luckily RAE took them on. So, he decided to have a go, and bought 6 RAE kits.
He thought it would be a bit of fun to make half a dozen, and try and sell the surplus so he would end up with a 'free' one for his own collection. He thought he would make as good a job as he could out of the fairly basic kit, so got some South Eastern Finecast wire wheels, and decent filler caps from Grand Prix Models. The rather weedy kit exhaust pipe was replaced with one from an old C Scale Vanwall kit, and Wessex Model and Toy Collectors club member Arthur Clapp cast some copies for him.
Arthur also cast the radiator scoops from the 'master' Barry had made from some spare white metal, and turned the brake discs from some nice shiny metal! He says the rear axle De Dion tubes were little lengths of aluminium tubing with the ends flattened, but can't remember whose steering wheels he used – they may have been Lansdowne ones.
After that it was just a question of cleaning up the original castings and putting them together on a mini production line! The 'Vanwall Special' decals came from the original kits, the race numbers from his bits box - some sheets of numbers he had picked up from somewhere.
He had intended to make 6, but unfortunately after spraying the bodies he put them aside to harden off, and one body ended up touching the edge of the box they had been put in. He tried to 'T cut' the resulting mark out, but ended up going through to the primer... After a certain amount of bad language he couldn't face stripping it and starting again, so the 'run' was reduced to 5 rather than 6!
He still has that spoilt one, and a couple of old Mikansue kits he picked up on good old eBay, and maybe, just maybe, one day he will make B-Line Models No.2 - the 3rd version of the 1954 Vanwall Special, which had a conventional radiator... But don't hold your breath!
He says that he can only consider them as 'chops', the B-Line Models thing was very much tongue in cheek, which is why he left the RAE labels on the boxes as well as his own. At best, he says, they do demonstrate that quite a nice model can be made from fairly basic beginnings, but it just took him the best part of 25 years to do them.
Subject ID: 81389
Subject ID: 81389
