Honey, I Shrunk The 4A-GE...

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Japanese Performance Car News, 07.07.2008 in Partner- und Mitglieder-Blogs, jpcnews.blogspot.com

Back in the glory days of high school I squandered much of my youth bent over little pieces of plastic, desperately trying to arrange them into a shape that more or less resembled a car without gluing anything critical to my fingers or inhaling too much paint. I pretty much abandoned this hobby soon after I realised that scale model cars rarely - if ever - excited the ladies and that "professional model car builder" was not really the most impressive job description. Still, I'm always impressed when I come across the work of someone else who has managed to make a pile of injection-moulded styrene look exactly like the real thing, and today I present to you the most amazing piece of work I have encountered to date: Mike Villena's super-detailed Toyota 4A-GE scale model engine.

This is no kit mind you, as Villena has fabricated each and every part from extruded and sheet styrene using only a bunch of reference photos to provide dimensions. The end result is an incredibly detailed engine block complete with oil and coolant galleries and stuffed with a scale crankshaft, conrods and pistons. The pistons themselves even have separate rings!

It's even put together like its full-size counterpart. The conrods are split at the big end and are joined together by tiny scale rod bolts. There are main bearing caps fixing the crank to the block and amazingly enough, Villena has even gone to the trouble of fabricating miniature valve springs for each valve. It's an incredible labour of love and Villena has yet to finish work on the 16-valve head, but you can check out his progress over at the Scale 4x4 RC Forums here