Modelling the Tamiya Wolf WR1, a step by step guide for beginners 1/12 scale English

Formula one

Modelling the Tamiya Wolf WR1: a step by step guide for beginners

1/12 scale

by Mario Covalski © Modeler Site

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Since I built my first Tamiya 1/12th kit, a certain number of years ago, around 30, I was fortunate enough to build many times the same models in different stages of my hobby modeling “career”. The Tamiya Wolf WR1 was released in 1978, after a good campaign of the 1977 season considering it was a small motor racing team. On those times Tamiya owners were F1 fans and in less than a year this incredible kit was already into the market Of course this kit have been superseded by newer technology, nevertheless, it still astonishes us. As soon as it appeared, I built two, with both versions of decals; at the beginning of the ‘90s, I built the third and finally, in 1998 the last one I put here for your consideration.

For the last 6 years, I’ve been writing over 50 articles focused on explaining not only my simple techniques but also sharing my experience about the scale models construction itself with simple notes to guide the inexperienced modeler on the satisfactory but sometimes complicated pathway of a model accomplishment.

Since some time ago, I’ve been receiving many mails asking me if I was considering to write about the kits on which I had not written these guides about . My answer is always the same. In Modelersite we’ve articles from other authors that cover these missing kits with my signing. However the Wolf is one of the most requested and though it’s not a difficult model to build, I decided to write a complement to the article written by my e- friend Tony Allen.
As the kit was constructed several years ago, and my vision of how to build a F1 kit was quite different, I’ll take advantage of the opportunity to write a note specially to novices, who I guess, will receive it with pleasure.

This note aims at providing beginners a complementary guideline, apart from the Tamiya’s instruction manual, including photos of a detailed and quality model to encourage him/her in what we could call a hard and laborious work…facing for the first time with a Tamiya’s box…with a 1/12 inside.

Before beginning…

If this is your first 1/12 kit, I advise you to take right now a decision: whether to build it following the instructions literally, or adding the suggestions provided here, or if your intention is to get a superdetailed model, trying to copy to the utmost the details that can be seen in the pictures offered in the Modelersite's articles.

Once your decision has been taken; if you’ve some experience in other fields of modelling, you can go ahead with an ambitious project, if not, you could build an out of the box one. The details you’ll find illustrated here, are easy to achieve by using simple tools.

Step a Step

Step 1

The suspension arms have to be glued to each other, note that each triangle has a small plastic circle indicating its reference to avoid mistakes once they are cut from the sprue ( parts H11, 12, 23, 24). Nevertheless, it’s necessary to remove them so as to eliminate the mold marks conveniently, and it’s essential to identify them in some way in order to avoid late errors.