Modelling the holy grey grille

Bringing the Hornby Sierra up to scratch

I haven't written about model vehicles on this blog for some time, so here's the story of a recent project that has kept me busy for a few hours and turned a piece of rubbish that most people wouldn't give a second glance into an accurate scale model. I work exclusively in 1/76 scale, the same as OO gauge model railways, which is well-served for bus and lorry models but not so much for cars until recently, and the subject of this piece may be nostalgic for those who modelled modern-image railways in the 1990s.

The old plastic Ford Sierra made by Hornby was just about all you could get at the time but doesn't seem to have much potential to make a decent model from first impressions and is now all but ignored as it is so inferior to the model cars now available. Don't write it off completely though: with a bit of hard work, as I have proved here, it can be transformed into something that wouldn't look out of place alongside the new generation of diecast cars. The car I have chosen to model is well-known in certain circles and its fascinating story has already been told here, so read on to find out how I replicated it in this small scale... 

A Hornby Sierra that actually looks like a Sierra, and the all-important grey grille is in place

Nowadays 1/76 scale modellers have a good choice of cars available to them, mostly thanks to Oxford Diecast's ever-expanding range. This is a fairly recent development though, and back in the 1990s literally the only ready-made modern car on the market was Hornby's Sierra. This had been developed as a load for their car-carrying railway wagon but was also made available separately in packs of three as a scenic item. It is a very crude and simple model consisting of half a dozen plastic parts: two black wheel/axle units, a baseplate and a moulding incorporating the interior, bumpers and lower sides (both in grey), the main body (available in red, yellow or blue) and a tinted glazing unit, all held together with two tiny screws. All parts are left in garish unpainted plastic and there is no painted or printed detail, so they just look like brightly-coloured blobs with not even the lights picked out.

Not the most promising of models. I suppose it looks vaguely Sierra-shaped.

A long time ago, I bought a pack of these and two received some detail painting to bring them up to an acceptable standard to appear on my layout, but I was never really happy with them so with the advent of the Oxford range they got put aside. The kindest thing that can be said about them is that they were better than nothing, but they really don't stand comparison with modern offerings so they are a thing of the past and very few remain in use on layouts nowadays. Following my encounter with the holy grey grille GVG 510Y at last year's Shitefest, I rediscovered the unmodified yellow Sierra gathering dust in a box and decided to take on the challenge of making something decent from it, the effort being worthwhile for a model of such a special car. Although Oxford Diecast have recently introduced a Sierra, a much better model albeit not without its own faults, this is a Sapphire Cosworth so it is really very unlike GVG and wouldn't make a good basis for a model of this, which left the Hornby as the only option.

The holy grey grille in all its faded glory

The big problem with the Hornby Sierra is that it doesn't actually look much like a Sierra, and is more like a generic toy car that happens to bear a vague resemblance to a Sierra. The main body is not too bad but the grey lower section is terrible and gives it a slab-sided look with its ridiculous flat sills, oversized boxy bumpers and lack of door shut lines. Fortunately, being plastic makes it fairly easy to work with and I would certainly have thought twice about doing this amount of work on a diecast model. I probably spent well over an hour with files and sandpaper, removing a load of excess plastic and reshaping the bumpers and sills to the correct curved profiles, which made a massive improvement and at this point it started to actually look like a real Sierra.

They're alright as a railway wagon load if you don't look too close

For reasons known only to themselves, Hornby moulded the leading edges of the front doors way too far forward so they are at the base of the A-pillars and look ridiculous. These were filled in and new ones scribed further back in the correct position just ahead of the mirrors. The door shuts are moulded only into the body and not the lower section, so they stop abruptly halfway down the sides and give the impression of tiny doors and massive sills like a gullwing Mercedes; these were extended downwards onto the reprofiled bottom part to make the doors look a sensible size. One mistake on the bodyshell I didn't notice until it was too late is the location of the fuel filler - the model has it on the nearside but on the real thing it is on the offside. Did Ford change the position of this on later Sierras?

An early effort. Better for some detailing but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

The model appears to represent a higher-spec Sierra, maybe an LX or GL, as it features tinted glass and a sunroof, luxuries that would definitely not have been available on the base model. The sunroof was filled in by cutting the panel out of the original glazing unit and gluing it into the aperture, then covering it with a thin layer of filler to create a solid roof. This Sierra seems to be a mish-mash of different versions as the majority of the detailing is correct for the original 1982 car but it has the headlight shape of the 1986 facelift - perhaps Hornby were developing the model when the facelift was announced and quickly updated it by bodging on the new frontal styling? These headlights are moulded only very faintly, so a thin skim of filler was enough to create a flat front, onto which the all-important grey grille could later be painted.

The back wasn't too bad but the bumper needed some work. Flush glazing makes a big difference.

With the structural work completed and the model now looking acceptably like a Sierra, the question arose of what colour to paint it. The real car was Cardinal Red when it left the factory, but a shiny coat of brand new paint in this shade wouldn't look much like the 34-year old faded and neglected paint on the car, and a whole can would be an expensive purchase just for the small amount needed on this one model. I ended up using Nissan Red 526, the colour I use for my fire appliance models, which over white primer gives a very bright fire engine red, but here I used red primer which made it look considerably darker and quite close in shade to the real thing. It's perhaps a little too dark, but photos can be deceptive and anyway there are multiple shades of red in evidence on the real car as a result of various repairs over the years. The grey grille was brush-painted on along with a grey front bumper, but the back bumper is correctly black as this is a replacement from a later Sierra, and finally the small details such as the lights, grille bars, Ford badges and door handles were carefully picked out with a small amount of paint on a cocktail stick to really bring the model to life.

The stars of Shitefest, reunited in miniature

The glazing unit pushes up inside the bodyshell, the thickness of which makes it look unrealistic. Being tinted it was wrong for GVG anyway so it was discarded (after cutting out the sunroof panel). As a first step, the inside edges of the window frames were painted matt black to disguise their thickness, and then the model was flush glazed by painstakingly cutting out individual panes of clear plastic to fit each window, a very fiddly and time-consuming task but one that made it look much better. Hornby's wheels are not up to much either so I cannibalised an Oxford Mark 1 Fiesta for its wheels. These aren't quite right as the base model Sierra used the wheels from the Mark 2 Fiesta, but are the closest available and look far more like the real ones than the originals. The poor old Fiesta is now sat up on blocks waiting for me to find a suitable set of replacement wheels.

The wheel donor awaits its fate

As a finishing touch, GVG 510Y numberplates were printed out and glued on, and after a lot of time and effort the model was finally complete and looked like the real holy grey grille. This was certainly a challenge but I think the effort was worth it and I find it very satisfying to transform something crude that many modellers would either ignore or throw away into a detailed model worthy of attention. All that work wouldn't have been necessary though if Hornby had taken a bit more care to make something that actually looked like what it was supposed to be in the first place! Oxford Diecast may be spoiling us nowadays with their large range of accurate models that we take for granted, but the old Hornby Sierra is a reminder that not so long ago things were very different and modellers were happy to get their hands on any 1/76 cars at all, no matter how crude or inaccurate.

Two extremes of Sierra: Cosworth and Base