Nissan S15 1:24 – More than a model car
The main character of this story will probably already be familiar to many people in the car and stance scene from the Lowlifer days, thanks to a certain ultra-low red Corrado. What may be less familiar, however, is what he has been up to since then. We sat down with Ruwe Saar to find out what happened to the Corrado, what he has been working on in the meantime, and to take a closer look at the world of scale model building.
Time really does fly unbelievably fast – it feels like we only just went to Pirita to shoot Golfs for the Lowlifer blog, but in reality that was already more than ten years ago. What eventually happened to the Corrado, and has anything new and exciting found its way into the garage over the years?
Yeah, time really does fly! It’s actually weird to think how long ago that was, how long ago we went shooting, and how long ago the Lowlifer club was active. And then there’s the fact that it’s already been about five years since I sold the Corrado.
The Corrado had been sitting for quite a long time before I sold it. In the meantime, I managed to get a slightly better and more sorted PG engine in there. I did most of the work myself, so the whole process took an insane amount of time. Life got in the way too, as they say. The spring of its final year, when I finally got it properly running and dialled in, was pretty damn awesome. Probably a little too awesome, because one day on the way home, pulling away from a set of traffic lights, there was a nasty clunk and one of the gears was done for. So the fun didn’t last very long, and by then I was also completely fed up with building a car in the courtyard of an apartment block. I had no garage, and was short on both time and money, so at that point I put both of my cars up for sale.
The other car I sold was my daily Impreza WRX. The plan was to sell one of the two, and as fate would have it, the Impreza stayed. Nothing new and exciting has appeared since then. I still have a little dream, though, that maybe one day I’ll get the chance to do it all over again …
Hopefully you’ll get the chance to take on another special project someday. But let’s move on to the hobby you’ve been quietly working on for the last few years. How did you get into scale models in the first place, and where did it all start?
I’ll start with childhood. I’m a child of the era who got to grow up with Gran Turismo from primary school onwards. That’s basically where my entire taste in cars came from. I always enjoyed driving too, but I spent most of my time building and tuning different cars. Not just in Gran Turismo either, but later in various tuning, drag racing and street racing games (NFS and its alternatives), and also in Forza Motorsport. I’d build the car. Done. Then I’d move on to building the next one. Growing up in the city, I didn’t get into real cars until I was turning 18 and got that same Corrado mentioned earlier as my first car.
My second-to-last completed build was a Top Secret BNR34, which was filmed in the studio and edited using video-editing software to make it look like footage from Gran Turismo.
Now let’s go back to the point when I sold the Corrado. Man, that was depressing! I felt a huge hole in my life. Cars had already been a massive part of my life since primary school. At the time I sold the Corrado, I still had the Impreza, but it was completely stock, and after selling such a radical Corrado, the driving experience wasn’t even remotely comparable. It had only been a couple of months since the sale when I was cleaning out the basement and found two boxed-up Fujimi 1:24 model kits. One was a Honda NSX and the other an Evo 8. I don’t even remember exactly how old I was when I ordered them from eBay, but I’d guess around 16. Both kits (kit being the term used for a buildable model set) had been left unfinished. Everything else had more or less worked out, but I couldn’t get the painting side of things right. So the kits sat untouched for a long time. I decided to give it another go. It seemed like a more suitable and cheaper hobby. Something I could still do alongside family life, on the living-room table, with far less money and time involved. And by now I’ve been building models for about five years.
What was the most difficult part about painting back then? Looking back now with the experience you’ve gained, what mistakes were you making and what would you recommend to beginners so they don’t run into the same problems?
I honestly don’t remember exactly what the problems were. I think the paint started bubbling and all sorts of other defects appeared. I was using random aerosol cans. I’d sand everything smooth several times and repaint it, only for the exact same defects to come back in exactly the same places. And to be honest, I still don’t really know how to paint properly, it just comes out a little better now. I’ve picked up some know-how about what you can and can’t do. Still, I’m very much at the beginning of the learning curve. I experiment, I watch and I hope I don’t completely fuck it up. Back then, YouTube wasn’t really a thing for learning – or if it was, there probably wasn’t anything particularly useful on there yet.
When it comes to painting, beginners can make the process much less stressful by keeping the surfaces clean and sticking to the same type of chemistry from start to finish. I’d stay away from all that eco-friendly water-based stuff. The more disgusting it smells, the more reliable the medium probably is.
What are the basic tools or supplies you absolutely need to get started with model building, and where do you usually buy them? And what about painting – are most people still using aerosol cans these days, or is an airbrush, basically a small paint gun, something worth moving towards over time?
I’ll try to keep it simple. Once you open the box, the first thing you need to do is cut the parts off the plastic sprues. So you need a pair of small side cutters. The next step is technically optional, but for a better result you need to clean the parts up from mould lines and other unnecessary bits, and a cheap nail file works really well for that. Then comes the glue. You can use hobby cement that melts the plastic together, regular super glue, or white craft glue. Tweezers are also useful for gluing and painting smaller parts.
Since you can’t paint absolutely everything with aerosol cans, you’ll need a few fine brushes for the smaller details and bottled or tube paints. For larger parts, a few aerosol cans. And unless I’ve forgotten something important, that’s basically it. You don’t need anything else to build your first kit. Of course, don’t take the above as a step-by-step guide. There are more stages involved, such as washing the parts at certain points before or during the build. And the more detailed you get, the more steps and tools you’ll end up adding – things you don’t strictly need, but which make building easier or help you achieve a better result.
First kit essentials: side cutters, nail file, glue, tweezers, fine brushes, paint (bottled and aerosol).
We actually have two really good shops in Estonia: Hobimaailm and Modelsshop. Both exist as physical stores as well as online shops. I’ve ordered different kits, paints, tools and aftermarket parts from all sorts of places, so I won’t start listing foreign shops separately. Anyone interested can ask me directly. But you can definitely get your first kit and all the necessary supplies from the shops mentioned above. And if you ask nicely, you’ll get some good advice too.
Aerosol cans are perfectly workable, and they’re much easier, faster and more hassle-free to use. The only downside is that too much paint comes out at once, which means you have very little control over the amount being applied. With an airbrush, you can turn the paint flow right down and literally paint the eyes on a fly without getting paint anywhere else on its body. So the level of control is massive, and that’s where an airbrush really shines when you’re painting the tiniest details. Even when painting the largest part, the body shell, you eventually need to reduce the paint flow and carefully work the hard-to-reach areas, panel gaps, raised sections and sharp edges. If you’re spraying at full blast, some areas will inevitably get flooded while others end up with too little paint or none at all.
Another advantage of an airbrush is that you can mix your own custom colours. The downside is how cumbersome the painting process becomes. Unless you have a dedicated workspace where all the equipment is already set up, every session means dragging out the compressor, airbrushes and the whole pile of chemicals, setting up the workbench somewhere, painting, then cleaning the airbrushes and packing everything away again. With an aerosol can, you can simply find some random corner, give it a few passes and you’re done. No power required, and no cleaning afterwards. For me, the most annoying thing about an airbrush is the cleaning. Sometimes I paint with almost ten different colours, and after every colour change you have to clean the airbrush before loading the next one. With aerosol cans, you put one down, pick up another and spray.
The S15 is only the second model I’ve painted with an airbrush. Everything before that was painted with aerosol cans. I still have quite a few aerosol cans left, and rather than letting them go to waste, I try to use them wherever possible on new projects. For example, the S15’s chassis was painted with a can. Some of the other underside parts were too. I’ve also decanted paint from some aerosol cans into bottles and then sprayed it through the airbrush. The Tein green on the S15 suspension is one example. So, in short – aerosol cans will get the job done, but an airbrush gives you a nicer result. The most important thing, though, is skill and knowing how to do the job.
Which kit manufacturers would you recommend, and how do they differ from one another? Which manufacturer’s S15 did you build? And do you generally have to look overseas for the rarer kits?
You don’t really get to choose a kit based on the manufacturer. It depends more on which car you want to build. One manufacturer makes one car, another makes a different one, and a third makes something else entirely. Sometimes there is overlap, but that’s more the exception than the rule. For example, if I want to build my Corrado, Revell is basically my only option. For an Evo 9, it’s Fujimi. For an S15, you have Aoshima and Fujimi. But if we’re talking about which manufacturer I’d recommend for a first kit, then definitely Tamiya. The price-to-quality ratio is one of the best. Aoshima and Hasegawa are generally safe bets too, although they require a little more tinkering. With Revell and Fujimi, it depends on the specific kit. Some are good, some are not. Fujimi’s biggest downside is that some of their cars aren’t particularly accurate representations of the real thing.
The main differences between kit manufacturers come down to the level of detail. Is the underside just a flat slab, or is there a whole lot more going on? How much assembly is involved? Does it come with an engine? How well do the parts actually fit together? How many mould lines and other manufacturing defects are there? And how accurately is the real car reproduced? There are quite a few kit manufacturers out there, plus 3D-printed kits. So far I’ve built Fujimi, Tamiya, Aoshima and AMT kits. Waiting in the stash are Revell, Hasegawa, NuNu, ARII, Monogram, Domino Collection, Trumpeter, D.Modelkits and Heller.
The S15 is made by Aoshima. Aoshima offers several different versions of the S15, meaning you can build the car with different bodykits. There are all sorts of factory versions, the Vertex version I built, Rodextyle, Top Secret, VeilSide, Cusco, Mine’s, Sard and so on. So there’s plenty to choose from. I personally liked the Vertex version the most. That said, I didn’t build an exact replica of the actual Vertex demo car. One of Aoshima’s biggest strengths is that they release multiple versions of the same model based on different tuning companies. The RX-7 is another example with a huge selection. They also do Lexuses with all sorts of VIP packages.
The rarest kits are generally the ones that are no longer in production. Usually, different kits get reissued every so often. But there are exceptions – kits that were produced once and haven’t been made again for a very long time. The Ferrari F40 is one example. It’s also one of my favourites. There are also cars that have never been made into kits at all, even though I think they absolutely deserve one. Rare kits can be found in international Facebook model-building groups, when someone has run out of room at home or decided to call it quits with the hobby for whatever reason. Naturally, rare kits also turn up on eBay. There are also hobby shops where, for whatever reason, rare kits have been sitting on a shelf. Why they’re still there, I have no idea. For example, a really cool shop in Helsinki, Finland, recently closed down for good. I used to visit every summer and always found something interesting there.
One example is the kit made in 1985 – Monogram Chevrolet Monte Carlo Skoal Bandit version. I haven’t built it yet, but the quality looks insanely smooth and good. It puts most modern kits to shame. In a hobby shop in Amsterdam, I found a Fujimi Lamborghini Diablo Koenig version. I’m not a huge fan of the regular Diablo, but the Koenig version is so ridiculously over-the-top that it becomes cool again! Until that moment, I didn’t even know that such a kit existed.
How many different wheels, seats, steering wheels and other tuning parts are available for models? Can most things be bought aftermarket, or do you have to make them yourself, for example by 3D-printing or scratch-building? What parts were already available for the S15?
There are an absolutely insane number of aftermarket parts available. It’s probably easier to answer what you can’t get. That’s what makes this hobby so cool – you can essentially build a car into whatever you want. You can hunt down your dream cars and build them exactly the way you’d want them. There is a huge aftermarket for model cars, and the possibilities become even greater if you or someone you know has a 3D printer. That opens up a whole new world. The more hardcore builders design parts completely from scratch. There are also scanned model bodies with custom bodykits designed for them in 3D software. For example, a builder I know from Sweden designed a pretty detailed lift kit and other parts for the Tamiya Alfa Romeo Giulia that came out last year, turning the regular road car into a resto-mod-style Dakar or Safari machine.
To get a feel for just how much is possible in this world, look up an Instagram user called stokemodels. His name is Martin Aveyard. It’s impossible for his builds to leave anyone cold. They put even the craziest SEMA projects to shame. If you don’t have a 3D printer, you can always scratch-build parts yourself. The older generation of builders are particularly good at this. People build complete tubular frames from scratch for modified bodies, turning them into completely wild drag cars. If the car you want doesn’t have any special versions available (unlike the S15), and there aren’t any 3D files for the extensions or bodykit either, you can always build the car wider or otherwise modify it yourself.
One of my future projects, for example, is taking a stock-body Mitsubishi FTO and turning it into an FTO LM Edition. I want it to look like the one from Gran Turismo. A similar car actually raced in the JGTC GT300 series, but for me there’s something special about the green car from Gran Turismo. Another, even more insane idea is to build the HKS Hypermax Evo that raced in Time Attack. Both would have to be built from scratch because kits of these specific versions don’t exist, and the last time I checked, there weren’t any 3D files for these modifications either. Aoshima’s tuning-series kits are great in that respect because, in addition to the parts specific to the tuning company the kit is based on, they often include a bunch of other cool parts too.
For example, the Vertex S15 kit came with a vented aftermarket bonnet. The real Vertex S15 is usually wingless, but the kit included a huge GT-style wing, which I ended up using. There were three different types of mirrors, two different steering wheels, two sets of seats, two different sets of taillights and so on. And once you’ve finished a kit with lots of extra parts, the leftovers go straight into the stash box. Then, when you start your next build, you might find something awesome in your own stash box. As for what’s on the S15 that didn’t come with the kit – things bought separately or made myself – that’s the wheels, brakes, exhaust muffler, metal badges and locks, Lowlifer sticker, front seats, seatbelts, harness bar and short shifter.
How do you achieve the right stance on a model? What do you have to pay attention to? And do you personally prefer the wheels to remain free-rolling, or do you prefer the show-car approach where everything is fixed in place purely to achieve the perfect stance?
It seems to me that a lot of people don’t pay much attention to this at all. It’s basically the same as with real cars – quite a few people don’t really care about fitment. I’ll often look at a model and think, “Oh, that’s actually really well built,” only to notice that the wheels are sitting completely crooked. For me, that’s a total error. That usually happens when you simply assemble the kit the way the manufacturer intended. On all of my builds, the wheels are glued into a fixed position. That way the car can’t accidentally roll off the table onto the floor, and it also stays exactly where it should be inside the display case.
Getting the wheels into the perfect position is actually pretty difficult. Every tiny touch or adjustment can have a surprisingly big effect on toe and camber. And at this scale, it’s not always immediately obvious whether you’ve got it right or not. There’s also a limited window while the glue is setting when you can still make corrections. For me, it’s a pretty nerve-racking process because I come from the stance scene, and the way the wheel sits in the arch is the single most important element of a car.
My setup process goes something like this: on a gridded cutting mat, I support the chassis from underneath with various tools to get the ride height exactly where I want it, so the wheel arch sits at the correct height relative to the wheel. If you don’t support the chassis from underneath and the arch is pushing against the wheel, you can’t slide the wheel underneath the car or adjust the angles without the body moving around or getting in the way. Then I straighten the body as much as possible using the lines on the cutting mat as a reference. After that, I start gluing the wheels on one by one using five-minute two-part epoxy. Before that, I tape the wheel to a small, thin piece of paper and use the paper to slide the wheel underneath the car. The paper gives the wheel enough freedom to move around. Without it, the tyre has too much grip and the whole process becomes either impossible or extremely difficult. My pace is roughly one or two wheels per day. I set the toe by eye, trying to get it looking straight against the grid and going purely by feel. For camber, I usually make a small angle template out of two tiny pieces of cardboard and then use it to replicate the same angle on the other wheels.
Coming back to your S15 specifically, what exact version is it? Is it a replica of a real car, or your own vision of the perfect Silvia? Roughly how many hours went into the build? Is there a detail that most people won’t notice at first glance, but which took the most time or effort?
It’s a Nissan Silvia S15 Spec-R with a Vertex Ridge bodykit. Usually, when I start a new project, I already have the whole vision worked out in my head. The colour, wheels, parts and the overall character of the car. Even though these cars will never actually drive, I usually know the engine and approximate power figure as well. As I mentioned earlier, these aren’t just model cars to me. I’m partly living out my own automotive dreams through them.
The S15 project was different from my other builds, though, because I hadn’t planned on building this car at all at that point. I already had another car on the bench. Then, towards the end of last summer, I saw an advert for an S-series Nissan build-off-style competition organised by some Polish guys. That’s when the thought popped into my head: “Wait, maybe I should enter the S15.” When I started the build, I wasn’t mentally prepared for this particular car. So I started looking at different S15s online for ideas and inspiration. It also hadn’t been long since Statement, where my favourite car happened to be a Porsche Miami Blue S15. That colour just suited the car so damn well. So I decided to paint my Nissan the same colour. Everything else – the modifications and overall direction – came from my own head. So yes, it’s my vision of the perfect Nissan S15.
I can’t really give you an exact number of hours, but the build took roughly three quarters of a year. I didn’t manage to finish the Nissan by the deadline for the Polish competition. I did, however, finish it just in time for an exhibition called Minimaailm, where I managed to take second place in the civilian vehicles category.
How big is your collection today? How many models have you built in total, and are they all still with you, or have some found new owners?
I’ve built seven completely on my own and five together with my kids. They’re all still here. The only thing missing from the photo is a tank, which is at work. The project in the top right is still unfinished. The five on the left were built with the kids. Starting with the white NSX, the models are arranged chronologically from left to right.
Have you ever considered building models to order or selling one of your finished projects? Or is this primarily a hobby you want to keep doing purely for yourself?
Of course. With any hobby, you eventually start thinking that it would be cool to make money from it. Even cooler would be doing it full-time. But in my case, I understand that it simply isn’t realistic. First of all, one of my projects takes so long to build that nobody would be willing to pay enough money for what is, after all, a tiny model car. Secondly, I wouldn’t have any time left for my own projects. And thirdly, one of my biggest motivations for starting new builds is seeing the finished projects sitting in the display cabinet.
I’m a massive car guy. If I could, I’d own real cars instead of models. But since owning a collection of real cars like that is impossible for me, I live out that dream through models. I build exactly the cars I want, exactly the way I’d want them to be if they were real cars in my garage. And luckily, whenever I look at my latest finished builds, the reaction is always somewhere along the lines of “fuuuck yeah, that’s fucking sick.”
Have you ever thought about getting into 3D printing yourself?
Of course I have, but living in an apartment makes it difficult. Resin printers, which give you better detail and are commonly used for this hobby, produce a seriously strong smell. And you have to learn how to use the printer and the software. At the moment, I feel like I’d rather focus on improving my own building and painting skills and leave the printing to other people.
How many model builders are there in Estonia, roughly?
That’s difficult to answer because, just like with real cars, there are always talented people quietly building some seriously cool stuff somewhere. All I can really say is that we have a group chat for plastic model car builders in Estonia with around ten people. There are rally, circuit racing, emergency vehicle, truck, tractor and stock-condition car enthusiasts in the group. But one thing that seems to work in Estonia’s favour is that there are apparently even fewer builders in Latvia, Lithuania and Finland. Finland does have a couple of world-famous names in the scene, though.
What model are you planning to build next?
A 1:25-scale Buick Wildcat from AMT. It should turn out pretty damn cool. The car’s backstory and the modifications I’ve got planned are interesting to me, at least.
Finally – why should a young person today give model building a try?
Because then you can enter next year’s Minimaailm exhibition with your own car and help grow what is currently a pretty small scene. And putting my own interests aside, there are plenty of reasons. First, you can own cars that would otherwise cost tens or hundreds of thousands – or even millions – and build them from scratch yourself, then say, “My Ferrari F40 Competizione.” Second, you can build a miniature version of your own real car. Third, you can create a completely unique model car. Fourth, it’s actually a really cool hobby for spending time with your kids. Fifth, you get to be a Dubai prince with a ridiculous car collection. Sixth – your model car doesn’t need an MOT. Seventh – once you’ve finished building it, the model car isn’t constantly breaking down.
And with that, I’ll make one final call to action. Everyone reading this: get yourselves down to Hobimaailm or Modelsshop, pick out a model you like, and mark the Minimaailm exhibition in your calendar. It takes place every year at the end of May (29-30.05.27). See you there!
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