The colours for the engine block seem almost spot on in the instructions, but you also get a double sided reference sheet of photos from the actual bike in the box. This is a nice little touch and also a great idea, It would be good to see that more often with the cutting edge kits.

I painted the engine in my normal way of priming gloss black, adding the paint then giving it a panel wash of diluted Tamiya smoke. It looked a little too shiny in the end so I gave it a light coat of satin varnish to dull things down a little bit.

I've painted the frame in semi gloss Tamiya X-18 and left it varnish free. This is actually spot on for replicating the black frame colour on the Yamaha. Well it was that colour on my R1, never rode the M1! I've taken extra care here not to get any micro sol on the bare paint when setting the decals on the frame.

I'm going to build this one completely out of the box so I'm not going to use any carbon fibre decals, instead I'm going to paint these parts in a glossy black to see how that turns out. The parts which would require them look like it would be really hard work to get them down smooth. There doesn't seem to be a pre cut or stencil sheet available for them so I'm going to leave that one alone!

I built this kit and posted it here a couple of years ago, you're right, it's a great kit, typical of Tamiya's latest offerings, I remember I got the detail up fork kit as well, well worth the extra money. The only tricky bit on these M1 kits is inserting the rear frame/chain assembly into the front frame/engine, there's definitely a knack to it! The Romsey Modelling Club has a couple of guys trying to build every bike and car that Valentino has ever ridden or driven, remember he also does some rallying, and tested for the Ferrari F1 team... check out http://www.romseymodellers.co.uk

Cheers Craig, you can still go wrong with Tamiya but it would be your own fault!

Your one was awesome with the 3 different bikes in the article. Yeah they are fiddly in places the bike builds! Cheers for the link, some impressive stuff on there. He's a talented racer is Rossi to be able to jump into an F1 car like that.

Cheers Simon, there's not been many rainy days this week! It's slowing my progress down because I keep wanting to be outside.

I've tried a nice little technique I seen on you tube. I cut a piece of masking tape into thin strips with the knife, then wrapped them round the exhaust to simulate the welds in the pipe. I sprayed some alclad hot metal blue and violet onto the pipes and then removed the strips of mask once cured.

2 attached images. Click to enlarge.

I've eventually found some time to do a bit of work on the M1. As normal with the bike builds a lot of sub assemblies must be done before putting the full thing together. The quality of the kit shows here with the complexity of the Ohlins rear shocker, which features ten different parts alone and a metal spring for the coil.

I gave the tyres a bit of a scrub as well to take the shine off them. The rear swing arm is left unvarnished also to keep the matt finish authentic to the black Yamaha frame.

6 attached images. Click to enlarge.

All of the little sub assemblies put to together, things are starting to take shape.

Cheers Simon. No bother, it often does. I'm moving house on Monday so progress will come to a halt soon!

Looking good, Richard, especially that exhaust. I only wish Tamiya would bring out some more recent bike kits...