spotarama

got this one as a glue bomb swap meet special, it's a johan kit. it was missing an A pillar and its wheels. it had a complete motor with beautifully formed headers. i replaced the A pillar with a length of 'angle iron' welded in place, upgraded a parts box roll cage, replaced the runk and hood panels with alloy sheet roughly bent to shape, they attach to the body over very short lengths of dressmakers pin through holes in the panels. the sills were also done the same way and then bent and twisted with my special bending and twisting pliers courtesy of the dentists surgery i was given (seriously, a whole surgery up to and including the chair) the motor came with the dual carb set-up so i drilled and meshed two holes in the hood for them to breathe through the trunk contains the fuel cell, battery and engine fire extinguisher with a smaller personal extinguisher beside the race seat inside the cabin theres a minimal amount of wiring but not plug wires (i'm working my way up to them...any day now)

this one started out as an idea to use up the body and make it as wild looking as possible, i think i got it right in that respect anyway. the wheel arches were carved out to suit the wheels and tyres (sorry can't remember where they came from) and the paint is rattlecan lime green (same coulour i painted my motorbike with black zebra stripes....tasteful......) the hood was cut from anti-perspirant can alloy with the edges thinned down. nice soft metal but thick enough to hold it shape. upgraded a basic roll cage from the spares box. the decals are all from the spares box, the '29's came from a Tamiya motorcycle Grandprix kit (i'm sure someone will remember who the rider was but i've forgotten, sorry, if it any help he was from the US and i think he was the last 2 stroke riding championship winner)

It did start off as Elvira's T-Bird (from the movie Elvira - Mistress of the Dark) but by the time i got it, all the 'Elvira' parts had gone AWOL, they were stuff like the spider web grill, bat hubcaps and barbwire surround rearview mirror, ah well never mind, i did clear green over silver paint, boxed over the back seats, put a roll cage over a race seat, 5 spoke 'Torq-Thrust D' wheels on the front, a pair of non-descript wheels and slicks from a cheap F1 toy on the back the inner door panels are swapped from either side and had all the armrests etc cut off which leaves nice neat cut-outs which kind of makes it look like the door trims have been taken off leaving the inner door panels exposed. i've done this on a few race cars and i think it looks 'right' if that makes sense even thought the model is basically finished, i've put it in "workbench" cos i've misplaced the windscreen and surround as well as the headlights....oops. if i ever find where i've put them i can finish it and into drag racing it goes.

this started off as a die-cast promo toy from a local hardware chain, i pulled it apart and added a set od AMG wheels and slicks on the back, a nascar racing seat, alloy 'moon' pedals, hydraulic mast levers made from pins, air horns, an orange dome light (safety first) and a set of V8 header pipes from a snaptite nascar kit. a quick coat of oxide yellow primer and a couple of 'serial number' decals and you've got the sort of forklift that anyone of us would love to get paid to drive. if i did it again, i think i'd do a much more 'race car' roll cage and possibly race drilled forks....... i also made the pallets from balsa, perfect little 1/24th replicas of real ones that we use at work. theres a couple of scooters there too, a Honda Jazz (from memory) and a Vespa Primavera. can't remember where the Honda came from but the Vespa was in a Tamiya set called 'college friends' what do people think ?

not sure if this is where i should have started this thread as its just seats rather than completed cars themselves but i reckon these two are like little models themselves this is one i built for a salt flats racer i'm making out of the Revell Pontiac Club de Mer, its made from two pices of aluminium cut from an anti-perspirant can cut, shaped and superglued then drilled and sanded to thin the edges for more scale appearance. the alloy i used is quite thick but very soft so its easy to form but holds its shape far better than soda cans. the next two shots are a seat i made for an Austin gasser from Revell (its getting de-gassered though, not a big fan of gassers) the black seat beside the altered silver one is the stock item that revell have given us in many a kit over the years. i cut slots out of half the 'ribs' and bent thin plastic coated wire to form the head and shoulder braces. holes were drilled thru the sides of the seat to thread the harnesses thru. the floor runners are brass strip. everything is superglued together and brush painted if this thread should be elsewhere then indeed shove it over to there what do people think of them ?

awesome builds on the thames and dixi, thanks heaps for the info on south eastern, i remember hearing about them years ago (pre-internet) and that they were making the rover V8 but lost the info back in the mists of time, i see some very english custom models in my future, shame they don't do a kit of the Rover P6 so i could build a model of my favourite car (that i've owned that is) and lets face it,a model can't be any less reliable than the car itself......... i'll go and do some pix of my jag powered thames and whack them up here cheers spotty

excellent work, what kit did the 'rover' engine come from, i've wanted some of those to do some english customs and rods for ages i'm part way through building the Revell Anglia van with full Jag running gear but i've always wondered if there was a buick/rover motor out there somewhere the BMW Dixi/Austin 7 (Revell again i think) is just crying out for a V8 and what could be more english than shoving a Rover in there, has anyonme done it yet? i built a stock one and its cute as hell but i really wished i'd gone silly on it, next time maybe.

thanks for the kind words, i think i've worked out how to drive the camera now so i'll try and get some better pix up over the weekend and i'll post some other cars too, cheers spotty

nice lookin' build, i've got one on the go with a jag engine and rear end out of an E type kit , very english 70s style i'll have to put some pix on the workbench thread

there we go, i've changed the tag to the name my mum uses (she's the only one though) the name 'spot' (or spotty or mr spot etc) was given to me about 30 years ago when i moved in with a friend and he noticed that my arms and legs are covered with scars and marks from insect bite 'spots', whenever i get bitten by anything, or get cut or scratched (pretty much any disturbance of the skin) it WILL get infected and take up to a year to heal, i've currently got a hole in my left forearm thats been there since last summer and shows no signs of going away....such is life. it all stems from when i was 5, i jumped into a european wasps nest that had moved into a hole i'd dug to play in in the back yard over a couple of days of lousy weather, apparently it should have killed me but as they say 'whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger' LOL anyway, to the models...i called them 'rat rods' cos i made them from the revell ratrod kits and the full cab one is inspired by a photo i saw of a japanese hotrod (check the 'rising sun' grill) that had had the body moved so far back that they could only just open the doors without hitting the rear wheels, loved it copied it....... i'm going to have a look thru the settings on my camera and see what i can find

hope the pics are back now

hopefully fixed the image problem

(with thanks to Souther Culture On The Skids for the title) i decided to have a go at making my own bodywork for a dirt track circuit racer, to be honest i don't even know if this car would actually have any real class to race in but what the heck i used aluminium anti-perspirant cans which are tick enuf metal to hold its shape but soft enuf to be easily workable, i'd used them to make hoods for a couple of other cars but went all out on this one. the hood and nose cone are removable, the hood is held on by 2 pins on top of the radiator, the nose cone clips over the front lip of the hood and the front of the frame hope you all like them and please let me know what you think

made these two from Revell Rat Rod kits, hope you like them, sorry the picture quality ain't great, i'm still getting the hang of close up stuff with the digi camera

that Merc 770K is just crying out for either a pickup conversion or a monster hotrod, bring 'em on

not exactly hobby shop but if you find a broken car ariel and cut the bottom off it the telescoping parts will then push out of each other and you end up with a whole load of chrome plated brass tubing. as well as all the usual uses for nice shiny tubing, the top end of each piece is bevelled and makes great exhaust tips.

i converted a 55 chev 2 door wagon to a panel delivery by gluing the rear side windows in before painting and then made a 'rubber' floor mat for the rear from a large black balloon i bought from a toy shop. i cut it with a round edged blade which i rolled across the surface rather than dragging as you normally would with plastic or such. as its such nice soft rubber it lies nice and flat but if you want to have it looking a bit untidy it also folds over/up most realistically and one idea i had for spray on bedliner for a pick-up would be to 'paint' the required areas with superglue in such quantities that it doesn't dry straight away and dust the area with talcum powder. as the glue dries it will shrink and pull the talc into all the corners etc and leave a suitably grainy surface which you'd then paint semi-gloss black or body colour i don't think it would work with paint or pledge as these would dry far thicker than CA and absorb the talc just an idea, let me know if it works

many years ago, i used to enter our local (sort of national) model show here in australia, i had attended a few before i entered and thought some of my models were at least as good as some on the tables. i never expected to win as making one small modification (de-chroming, different wheels etc and every car i build has something done to it) was enuf to put you into 'modified', fair enuf, those are thr rules but it puts you up against guys using a hundred bucks worth of photo-etch and billet, so as i said, i never expected to win. what i didn'r expect was for other competitors to re-arrange the models to get theirs into better positions on the table after turning up 5 minutes before entries closed what i didn't expect was for my models to have parts broken off them whilst displayed or being judged (this happened two years in a row) what i didn't expect was to hear the (2)winners of one particular class laughing between themselves about 'why do these losers bother turning up, they never stood a chance against us?' (though i did wonder how they managed to build one model between the two of them if one was holding the other one's hand the whole time......) as a result, not only do i not enter shows anymore, i don't even bother going, they apparently don't want or need my sort of 'loser' to help them pat themselves on their collective backs after typing the above i've just wandered into the toy room and had a look at some of my builds and remembered why i build what i do...for me. its exactly the same as my 1:1 motorbikes, some people hate what i do to bikes (acid green and black zebra stripes anyone?) but i'm doing it for me i hope i don't come across as bitter and twisted, i just realised that the show scene ain't for me, good luck to those that do go for it

hiya fuel injected, i'm in oz too (none too sunny melbourne, at least not today). i bought a big bag if green gras/flocking stuff from a railroad shop ages ago for a diorama and used about a teaspoon.......if you email me on spotarama@hotmail.com with your address i'll send you a bag full of the stuff, i've even got a load of free auspost o/nite satchels so it won't cost either of us anything, glad to help i made the driveway surfaces for my dio to look like concrete, i tinted pourable plaster with black acrylic paint and then scribed 'expansion' grooves and cracks into the surface once it had dried. as it was a scruffy sort of yard i was depicting i used a tiny bit of the grass material in some of the grooves to replicate the grass that naturally grows in the cracks and grooves in your driveway. you can see some pix of it being used as the background for some of my cars on http://spotarama.webs.com/apps/photos/album?albumid=5878391 if you like i can drag it out of its hiding place in the cupboard and get some better pics cheers spotty

hi there, this is the Trabbie i built a while ago, i went for gritty East German realism.......two stroke smoke stains and all. i put the windows in with superglue to purposely get fogging, after all East Germany can be a chilly place

hi guys, greetings from australia, i've been out of building for a while (since i lost my build area) but i'm going to give myself a kick up the backside and get going again, hopefully looking thru here will give me the impetus i need if you check out my website http://spotarama.webs.com/apps/photos/album?albumid=5878391 you'll get an idea of the sort of stuff i've built in the past, just about everything is customised in one way or another, sometimes a little more than i'm capable of 'fixing', still we live and learn. i've got a rear engined corvette concept / ZZ Top Eliminator project thats had me stumped for years but when i get my head round it, it'll be a cracker on my site you'll probably see my cats, dogs and motorbbikes which are the main obsessions in my life along with music, i collect records and do the ocassional shift at a local public access radio station www.pbsfm.org.au playing mostly punk records. i'm currently trying to get a regualrly scheduled show which shouuld take care of any spare time i thought i might have........ anyway let me lknow what you think of the models and i'll see you soon cheers, spotty