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I had a finished model of a Yamaha YZR500 GP bike that had been done many years ago, and I thought it could do with an update as it wasn’t very detailed.

The picture was taken a while ago on an old camera, but you can clearly see it isn’t my best model!

The first thing I had to done was totally strip it down to its major parts, I discarded the fairing and seat unit but kept the fuel tank and front mudguard to repaint and refit to the finished bike. I also removed the wheels, swing-arm, exhaust and engine as the pictures show. 

After doing some research, I discovered that I had a lot of work to do to get it up to scratch; the first thing I did was to repaint the engine so it accurately matched pictures of the real thing.

Before

After

After this I repainted the wheels and brake discs and refitted the tyres.

I then stripped, repainted and rebuilt the frame, paying attention to various pipes and cables. Once I was happy with this, I re-assembled the wheels, engine and swing-arm as below.

 Next to do was to sort out the exhausts pipes. On the original model they were the completely wrong colour with no detail at all. I spent a lot of time putting this right. I had to mix the correct base colour to repaint the pipes, then once dry I could dry brush the welding detail and redo the carbon decals on the silencers – they now looked a lot better and more realistic.

I could now fit the exhausts back onto the bike. I had a slight problem as I was not refitting the seat unit because the exhausts were attached to the seat with screws. I therefore had to support the underseat exhausts until the glue was completely set.

Once the glue was set I could remove any support from the exhausts.

 I then fitted the other 2 exhausts

 Once this was all dry, I fitted all the remaining cables to the engine and electronics. I scratch built the sensor array on the rear mudguard and the electronic data box on the air intakes.

I then repainted the fuel tank and front mudguard. I chose a plain gloss white finish as I found some pictures of the bikes taken during pre-season testing in 1998 and they were painted all white with a few markings on them.

Once this was done I fitted them to the bike to complete the model. I think it now looks a lot better and realistic and shows what can be done with an old not so well built kit.