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What? You’re back for more? Here’s the saga of the starboard side of the engine:
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The next steps, the chassis and firewall, will follow shortly.
- The Air Cleaner/Silencer
I’ve already touched upon the air filter and its yellowness. Behind it is a long tube that acts as a silencer. It looks simple enough, but actually, the longest part (74746) is moulded incorrectly (surprised?). The wall of the tube is thicker on one side than the other, and when it is attached to part 74744, one side of the tube smoothly lines up, but the opposite side clearly sticks out. Wanting a single smooth silencer from front to back, I turned the tube so that the smoothness was on top.
The next problem with this tube had to do with the fact that it had already been broken off of the sprue before I opened the box. In the process of breaking off, a big gouge was created where it had attached to the sprue. Filling it would have been problematical, so I simply shortened the tube by 1/16th of an inch. However, where the tube joined part 74748, the unevenness of the wall thickness forced part 74748 to be off centre. The solution I sought here was to carve out enough of the thicker part of the tube to centre part 74748. I then painted the lip on 74748 chrome, and that provided a nice touch.
In mounting the silencer, I sought to have it as low and aft as possible. To do this, I bent the aft metal bracket (part 71003) in a curve rather than an angle. Snuggled up against part 74748, it looked very good. But then it wouldn’t line up with the bent hose, so I moved it forward by inserting a plastic washer (from a Kadee coupler kit) as a spacer before part 74748 – I wanted to keep the curve in that metal bracket. This necessitated cutting a notch into the lip of part 74748 to clear the screw that held down the metal bracket. This all included a kzillion test fits.
- The Intake and Exhaust Manifolds
I painted the intake manifold an aluminum colour, and the exhaust manifold something that Testors calls “Steel”. Steel seems to be little more than a bit of grey paint with loads of metal flakes, and it is absolutely delicious. I’ve tried to use it everywhere I can, and the exhaust manifold provided ample opportunity.
The exhaust manifold sits on top of the up draft carburetor with nothing to line up the two parts, and expectedly, they desperately need some help lining up. Fortunately, the bottom of the manifold and the top of the carburetor both have cavities, and I stuffed a specially bent paper clip into these cavities.
- The Carburetor
Expert Tip 9 introduced me to chrome paint. Until now, I’ve used silver – I didn’t know that there was such a thing as chrome paint. I bought a bottle, shook it and opened it up. Inside was a glorious, consistent shininess. It was beautiful. I covered my carburetor in it. So should you.
This Mercedes kit (K91) excludes the choke cable, but Model Motorcars provided me with a replacement. Manufacturing my own part 74043 in plastic was easy. The float was handled identically as on the port side, by filling it with orange paint (amber probably would have been better) and by cutting off the pin of part 74666. And while installing copper piping on the port side, I saw in a photograph that the carburetor of a 540K had a loop of piping on top, so I added one here.
The instructions incorrectly show that a copper pipe is to go between carburetor part 74666 and part 74661. Instead, both of these pipes should be independently going towards the firewall, with the pipe from 74666 connecting up with parts 74533x2.
- The Supercharger
Piping parts 74660 and 74661 were too far apart to fit into the supercharger (part 74659), so intermediate part 74662 was shortened sufficiently. And once the piping is attached to the carburetor and manifolds, and the supercharger is attached to part 74668, there are gaps in the slots in the top and bottom of the supercharger. These were summarily filled and painted over.
- The Starter
Again, here is a component that could have been supplied by a sub-contractor to Mercedes, so I painted it a very contrasting but not unrealistic colour and placed a “metal plaque” on it. The wires were not included in kit K91, and I just happened to have this overly thick, colourful pair. They look better together than apart, so I bound them in a stretched spring. There are two small holes in the firewall for the wires individually, but I’ve enlarged one for this pair of wires. The other hole will be used for the copper pipe from part 74661.