The S15 has always been one of my favorite JDM cars – ironically I never really cared for any S chassis cars in general, but the last-generation Silvia always held a special place in my heart. Not least because this exact Aoshima kit was one of my first car models that broke me into this hobby in the first place, many many moons ago. I’ve since retired that first S15 I built so long ago, but I’m ready to give it another crack now.
There are a ton of S15 models available, with nearly every aftermarket kit or bumper for these cars made in scale form one way or another. Building the exact same spec as the first S15 I built wouldn’t normally be my style, but I just happened to have an extra copy of this kit laying around, so it didn’t really make sense to go out and buy another whole S15 just for the sake of a different body kit.
So, we buy just the body kit separately. This is a resin transkit from Scale Stars – the C-West kit here isn’t anything crazy or outlandish, but it’s just subtle and interesting enough for my tastes. This also happens to be the very kit the famous Mona Lisa S15 wears in Tokyo Drift!
The main body shell comes without front or rear bumpers attached, and a separate hood. I imagine Aoshima only does it like this so they can release multiple versions of the S15 with different body kits, while allowing them to reuse the same core shell.
Lucky for us, Scale Stars’ C-West kit was originally designed for the Aoshima body, so the bumpers line up nicely without any adjustments needed – they even have indents molded in for the body tabs! How luxurious, we don’t always get such niceties with aftermarket body kits
The skirts are a lay-over type, so to minimize the transition from the body kit to the actual fender I sanded the skirts down just a bit thinner to fit
Amusingly, Scale Stars also includes a set of Ganador-style mirrors as part of their C-West kit, but Aoshima also includes the exact same mirrors in plastic as part of the Top Secret kit. Guess we’re getting Ganadors one way or another!
For this project however, we’ll need to do some more modifications to the front end before just fitting the body kit on – we’re making this a full motor build, which means it’ll need an engine bay first. Luckily Eternity Hobby Supply has a 1/24 resin printed S-Chassis engine bay available.
To fit the 3D printed engine bay, we’ll have to cut out the original hood frame and bumper mount from the body shell
The entire front of the chassis plate will also need to be cut to fit the new bay
Aoshima does provide some molded transmission and engine detail underneath, but we’ll be removing all of that for our full motor to go in
I was hoping I could keep the wheel arches at least and just cut the molded bottom of the engine out, but it still wasn’t enough
Keep cutting until it fits lol. I ended up cutting everything in front of the cabin space off of the original chassis plate and just gluing the new engine bay straight onto it
Body kit and wing dry fitted and test fitted
An interesting quandary I quickly discovered when attempting to dry fit the wheels – the new engine bay actually gets in the way of fitting proper wheels in the wheel arch, since parts of the 3D print extend downwards into the fender well area quite a bit
I had to go in with a heat knife and carve out chunks underneath the engine bay to make as much room as possible for the wheels without punching through to the top of the bay
I, uh, did accidentally punch through to the top of the bay lol. But that’s okay, Bondo fixes and smooths all!
Chassis plate prepped and ready for proper paint – I did end up having to enlarge the transmission tunnel quite a bit, which is why you see all the holes filled by Bondo there
We’re not shoving a V8 or a straight-six in there this time – just a classic SR20 motor that S15s actually came with. This full engine kit comes courtesy Texas 3D Customs.
We’re ditching the tiny stock turbo and upgrading to a larger HKS unit, because size does matter. The big turbo and intercooler are all resin aftermarket parts I scrounged out of my parts bin, I’m pretty sure they were eBay buys back in the day.
I don’t have extra intake manifolds laying around, but thankfully I did have an extra random 4-cylinder turbo manifold – I’m only swapping to this one because the stock manifold places the turbo too far forward
Valve cover painted red because I’m painfully unoriginal and literally do not know how to style an engine unless it’s red because red means fast
I have to give credit where it’s due – the resin print at this scale is incredibly crisp, with the letters raised on the valve cover quite legible and clear – unfortunately because they are raised letters, the only way to really bring them out is with needle-point hand-painting…and that’s about as good as I could get it with these old shaky fingers
I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of warm colored cars lately – this is Tamiya TS-56 Brilliant Orange, which is a lighter almost yellowy orange. I used this color last on a commission Mustang build, albiet with a satin/flat finish.
Painted the engine bay body color and attached the original Aoshima front plastic subframe to the bottom. Some minor cutting was needed, but the width of everything lined up, so it wasn’t too difficult to fit these parts that were absolutely never meant for each other
Eternity’s S-Chassis engine bay comes with some very nice detail molded right into the bay, like the ABS module, windshield wiper motor, and brake booster/master cylinder. I had even primed them white getting ready to paint them in when I realized…the brake booster has to be flipped to the other side since the S15 is RHD!
I ended up cutting all the accessories off the firewall and smoothing it all out for a shaved bay look. The motor is mounted via the subframe at the bottom.
The master cylinder and brake booster I cut off the engine bay was unfortunately lost in the process, so I’ll be installing another master cylinder from an aftermarket parts set. We’ll also be tossing the ABS module, as nice as it is as a bit of mechanical detail, because real racers use their right foot as ABS.
We’ll also have to add our own radiator and intercooler for this setup – I dug around and ended up pulling a spare radiator from a Revell Mitsubishi Eclipse kit.
The brake disks/calipers and axle-back portion of the exhaust originally came out of the box in plated chrome. A quick Purple Power bath strips them right down to plastic so I can paint them myself.
Undercarriage done. I really didn’t make any modifications to the rear half – everything there down to the exhaust is out-of-box Aoshima
Hilariously, the aftermarket resin intercooler is damn near larger than the plastic Revell radiator. Priorities are boost, right?
At its core, boost is quite simple…right? Just two styrene pipes heated and bent to fit from the turbo and intake manifold to the intercooler is all it needs, right?? (Please never let me become a real mechanic)
I’ve always struggled with finding a good material/look for boost pipe couplers – I’ve used masking tape, pinstriping vinyl tape, even just cut paper in the past before, but I’ve never really been satisfied with the thickness and texture of any of those – until I found the ultimate secret weapon – duct (DUCK?) tape, duh! It’s thicker than regular paper, already sticky on one side, easy to work with and cut to size, and has a rubbery texture on the surface that emulates the look and feel of real silicone couplers quite well. Wish I thought of this sooner!
Moving onto the interior – not planning to go nuts here, since I’m already maximum effort’ing the motor. Pulled some random no-name bucket seats from my parts bin
Masking the door cards for some red inserts. Apparently only the passenger door gets a grab handle in an S15? I never noticed the driver door side not having a handle, and I’ve driven multiple S15s before.
Okay, maybe we’ll be juusstttt a little extra with some red carpet flocking. I have no idea if S15s actually ever came with red carpeting from factory the way a lot of Hondas have, but it’ll tie the interior together a bit better than just red seats and door cards will.
Some light pewter gray acrylic paint brushed on the dash for that two-tone look. These arts and craft acrylic paints are thick, so I’m thinning them quite significantly with water to get a smooth finish out of them with a brush
Not complicated or particularly fancy, but it turned out pretty clean. The little extra gauge on the dash was added out of an Aoshima aftermarket parts pack, it just glues onto the dash.
I was having some major wheel paralysis during the course of this build. Normally before I even start putting anything together, I plan out my builds with exactly what body kit, wheels, color, livery, etc ahead of time so I’m never in the middle of a build waiting on parts.
In this case, I originally wanted to use these ZE40s from ZoomOn with this kit, but after test fitting them they ended up just looking too large for the body, so I was left scavenging through my wheel bin to find something in the 17″-18″ range that would look good. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite feeling any of the above choices.
Anyway, while I was stewing on the wheels, I decided to go in on the body livery. In a bit of a callback to myself, I decided to do a bit of a remix of the first livery graphic style I painted on my first S15 so many years ago.
The first time I did this, I literally just used masking tape and followed the body line on the S15’s flanks – it’s a very defined line that travels from the base of the C pillar and disappears right underneath the A pillar. On my first S15, I did a black and white stripe stack that started at the edge of the trunk – this time, I decided to carry the graphic into the trunk, painting it black with the silver stripe bisecting the rear face of the trunk lid as it goes through the taillights.
With the livery there and the engine bay mostly there, I finally decided to throw on a set of deep dish Work Equip 05s and…it works?!
I wanted to avoid using these wheels since they’re egregiously deep dish and therefore should best be saved for a widebody build or something but…this is so far the only set in size and design that I’ve vibed with on this body.
I was originally also going to use the GT wing that came in the box with the base Aoshima kit, but when I test fit one of these random aftermarket wings on the trunk just for fun, it happened to fit width-wise and it looked pretty good?! I figured I have enough builds with GT wings, we can afford to mix it up a bit with a more unorthodox wing design this time.
Back to the engine bay – adding some coolant piping in with cheap jewelry wire ($0.98!)
As I was looking into photos of shaved S15 engine bays, I found most of them had some sort of catch-can like aftermarket reservoir coming off the turbo and valve cover (I don’t actually know what it is proper, I’m not an automotive tech, big hairdryer go brrrrrrr), so I decided to make it myself out of polystyrene plates – it’s just a box, how hard could it be?
Drilled some tiny holes into the sides after I cleaned it up for the oil return lines
Plopped it into the little nook opposite the brake booster and glued in some tiny braided wire. Don’t ask where the wires are going to underneath the turbo, because I don’t know either.
The headlights originally came in chrome, with Aoshima telling you to paint the exterior of the housings black, but I opted for the opposite approach since I find it easier to paint chrome on black than black on plated chrome – I stripped the piece in degreaser first, painted it semi-gloss black, and added the chrome into the lenses again by hand with Molotow Liquid Chrome.
The only bit of carbon on this whole thing is going to be the vent area on the hood. I deliberately painted the underside of the hood flat black to emulate the look of bare fiberglass and left a thin bezel around it that’s color matched orange – I want to give the impression that this is a color-matched carbon fiber hood.
Going with some aftermarket photo-etched rotors for the brakes – I don’t even remember where I got this brake rotor set from, it’s been sitting in my parts bin for what feels like years
Ironically the rotor set is meant to be a full multi-piece detailed rotor set, with interior rotor veins and everything, but here I am doing the least by just cutting some slits for the calipers and sliding them right over the original rotor hubs lmao
I never noticed it before the first time I built this kit, but Aoshima actually includes two different taillight variants for you to select from – I’m so used to the iconic split-lens design of the original S15 taillights that I never even thought about the other variant they give you, which apparently are based off aftermarket lights for the S15 from I-Magic.
The I-Magic taillights are more traditional in that they’re just a chrome housing with clear lenses instead of the multi-colored lenses of the stock taillights. I think they’re meant to be Altezza-style with clear lenses, but after trying it out it just looked wrong to me, so I’m painting the lenses clear red anyway
Bless Aoshima as usual for their window masking stickers out of the box
Funny thing, because of the unique turbo manifold situation, the turbo is mounted a lot higher than the top of the motor, causing it to just barely clear the hood when it’s closed. I tried playing with the chassis-to-body fitment as much as I could to get it as much clearance as possible, but even then there was still some contact that prevented the hood from laying flat when closed – I surmised that just a few mm grinded out of the bottom of the hood would be enough to get me the clearance I needed, so I went to town with a dremel and prayed that I wouldn’t burn through the plastic.
After mounting the headlights (which were their own miracle, look at how tight the clearance is on the edge of the headlight housing and the radiator support beam on the engine bay! A reminder that none of these parts were ever designed to go together, and that it’s all just been prayers and vibes), I found that they were totally open at the top since…Aoshima never designed this kit to have an opening hood, and therefore there was no need to make sealed headlight housings. This looked extremely weird with the hood open, so I traced and cut some pieces of styrene to just lay on top of each headlight housing and seal them off.
And finally, adding some decals – just some minor sponsor markings to line the sideskirts, nothing crazy
Done! For a build that went through a lot of planning changes during the process, I’m surprisingly happy with the outcome. I truly didn’t know if the black and silver would work with the orange and white faced wheels – I was worried it was going to be too much and look too busy, which is why I didn’t go with more decal markings, in an effort to still keep the overall look clean and mildly understated despite everything that’s going on
The main story is obviously the motor – how much boost is that Hiroshima Hairdryer pushing?!
Ironically, I ended up having to delete nearly the entire front subframe that I had originally glued in anyway, since it was getting in the way of getting the car low enough on these smaller wheels. After I removed it, it did look weird with the engine essentially floating in place in the bay, with nothing holding it except the transmission glued to the chassis plate, so I went back and cut motor mounts out of the original subframe and shoved them in on the back of the block, where you can barely even see them, but now if anyone really nitpicks the details, I can say I have motor mounts!
It’s a little thing, but I’m so proud of the stripe livery on the flanks going through the door handle – I almost always just forget or am too lazy to mask door handles when I’m doing flank liveries, but I remembered distinctly how I didn’t like the look of the striping going through the handles on my original S15 when I first did this look.
I wonder if this wing is actually based off a real-life brand of anything – I sure haven’t seen anything like this two-tier trunk mount design, bar like OEM Subaru wings.
It should go without saying that the front wheels don’t turn, given I had pretty much completely deleted the original front subframe and chassis structure that made a steering rack possible.
Annoyingly, I didn’t realize until the build was nearly finished that the edges of the front bumper upper grille are a tad short – they don’t quite reach all the way up to touch the hood as they should. Good thing this is less noticeable with the hood up and open, which is how this model will be displayed, so I’m less inclined to make any attempt at fixing it
