André-Marie RUF modèles réduits - Kits métal et modèles montés
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An AMR model is made of diverse pieces and parts. The average number of parts is 90 to 100.

There are pieces of casting (white metal), photoetched parts, lathe-turned pieces, transparent plastic for glazed parts.

The conception and the realization of a car require from 15 days up to 6 months.
This time can be broken down into this way :
- Selection of a model and colours,
- Research of documentation. That means find and see the real car when possible to picture and measure it. The time taken with the real car allows André-Marie Ruf to feel the car. This feeling will remain while sculpting the wax and it explains why each AMR model have a real personnality.
- Drawing at the scale.

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Once the model is chosen and that the required documents are found, it's time to sculpt, clean, polish, cast and draw. The four steps below will give you a rough idea of it all.





1- All the parts that will be in white metal are sculpted into wax.
It all starts with a cube of wax, hand sculpted with dentist tools.

All wax parts are drowned into a cylider of liquid plaster. Once the plaster is solid, the cylinder is warmed into an oven. Hot, the wax become liquid and flows out. Liquid brass or bronze is then pourred into the plaster cylinder.
Once the cylinder has cooled, the plaster is broken, revealing bronze or brass parts gathered around the feeder canal.
 
1 - Sculpt the master into wax
2 - The wax, by the process of lost-wax, becomes bronze. All these parts will be fitted and burnished. They are the master of the model. Therefore, this is the most important step of a model creation. The better the fiittng and the burnishing of the master is, the smoother the white metal will be.
Bronze or wax is used because of its resistance to heat and pressure. To take the print, the mold made out of silicon will be heaten up to 180 celsius degrees at 70 kg /cm2 during several hours.

 

2 - Clean and polish the bronze

3 - The bronze parts are molded into two slices of uncooked silicone.
Depending of the parts size, the diameter and the thickness varies from 200 to 400 and 7 to 20 millimeters. It could weight up to 7 kilos. A you may have already understood the small mold is for driving wheel, seats, bumpers, mirrors and wheels. The big one is for body and chassis.
The uncooked silicone has to be vulcanized. This is why it is heaten under pressure.
The casting. The white metal is warmed and poored into the mold. Centrifugation allows the molten metal to fill all free spaces. A mold has a lifetime of about 400 runs.
 

3 - Mold the parts

4 - And last but no least
The first white metal parts are used to shape the windows, form the photoetched parts, check the size of the decals.
The instruction for assembly is drawn once the kit is complete.
 

4 -A kit is born !

The time of building varies according to the cars, from 4 to 10 hours, without the time of painting.