Jaguar Mark X (The Black Island)

The Black Island (French: L’Île noire) is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from April to November 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to England in pursuit of a gang of counterfeiters. Framed for theft and hunted by detectives Thomson and Thompson, Tintin follows the criminals to Scotland, discovering their lair on the Black Island.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

Since I’ve already built the Ford Zephyr Taxi, DHC Chipmunk, the Loch Lomond Rail Tanker, and the Motorboat – and still have plans to build several others (including the DH Tiger Moth), I really don’t have much left to talk about in regards to the story itself. Check those pages out if you want to know more about my thoughts on it.

Suffice it to say that The Black Island is one of the albums (perhaps only outdone by The Calculus Affair) which features the widest section of trains, planes and automobiles – making it a scale modeller’s paradise!

In a nutshell, this is because, when it came time to publish The Black Island in the U.K. in the mid-1960s, Hergé’s British publishers requested a major revision of the story. Since the story is set in the UK, the publishers wanted the story updated to better reflect the current local situations and thus be more palatable to then-modern readers. To that end, Hergé sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain on a research trip, and the revised edition in Tintin Magazine bore the fruits of that research.

The build:

What’s (arguably) more interesting is how I went about getting a build of a 1/72 scale Jaguar Mark X.  You’d be right in assuming that no kits exist in that scale.  In fact, as far as I know, there isn’t even a plastic car to be had anywhere.  So, the only option was a Matchbox diecast metal car.

For those keeping track of such things, it’s number 28-C from the Matchbox series 1-75 (produced between 1964 and 1968).

Now, in the past I might have tried to make a plastic copy of the car using a silicone mould and resin casting process, but I decided against it for a couple of reasons.  The first is… that’s a lot of work. Given my recent global relocation from South Korea back to Canada, I didn’t have any resin on hand.  But, I also decided that since the car is basically a perfect representation of what I wanted… why bother?

I also thought it would be a good idea to try painting metal.  Famous last words.

First off, I had to clean the old paint and polish up the metal. No problem. I had to soak it in a few kinds of paint thinner, and use some elbow grease (and a few toothpicks) to remove it, but I got it off.

At first I just painted Tamiya acrylic on to the bare metal, but I kept having problems with the paint chipping off. In the end, and after some trial and error, the process was basically – coat the metal body with Tamiya metal primer (using a brush), then I added XF-22 RLM Grey as a base coat, and covered that with Future to seal it. Then I added a top coat of X-7 Red, and another coat of Future to seal that, before carefully masking off the trim (a few bits at a time) and giving it a once over in X-11 Chrome Silver.. and then sealing the whole thing in Future once again.

For the interior, I mixed up a witches’ brew of Tamiya acrylics to get a “light brown leather” look.  At first it was a bit too orange, but after a few tries, I was able to get something I liked.

What actually took the longest was the windshield (well, all the clear parts). I tried to cut a few corners and use a homemade dremel (using an electric eraser) to sand down the clear parts in order to polish them up.  I accidentally used too much power and dug some grooves in the “glass”.  So much of the time was spent trying to smooth them out using a succession of 400/600/1000/1200/2000/3000 grit Tamiya sandpaper.  In the end, I just had to call it as I was worried that the ancient plastic would crack under the stress.

All things considered, I’m quite happy to give it a go in the refurbished diecast metal car game. It probably won’t replace my love of building in plastic… but it’s a fun alternative when other options are limited.

Well, feel free to tell me what you think.