black2002ls

Rear suspension is ALMOST ready to go in. I had to fill the top of the rear end housing so that I had a place to attach lines. If you notice the front and rear brake calipers are different sizes, this was done intentionally. The rear brake calipers are resin pieces that I acquired with the machined aluminum rotors in an ebay parts lot in 06 or 07. The front calipers are cast metal and are significantly larger! Pro tech PE bolt heads were added for various detials.

Chassis work getting done. My primary regret with the chassis is that I did not clear it after painting it gray. There are some inconsistencies with the finish that a coat of urethane clear would have pretty much taken care of. Hopefully it doesn't cost me too much with the judges. this is almost how it sits now. Lots of details in there, and lots more to go. You can see the tin work for the radiator, that was fashioned from embossing metal. Coil springs, wedge bolts, sway bar end links, etc. Note that there is no head on the jack bolts. that was intentional, all of the reference I could find essentially showed a threaded rod with a relief in it to receive a socket wrench extension for adjustment. The extension would lock into the relief much like it was attaching to a socket. This was the beginning of chassis detail. The steering box was painted with a base coat of Tamiya titanium gold and finished with clear yellow trying to make sure everything fit. Hint: in the end it did not and had to be disassembled several times to sort out issues. close up of the tin work. upper radiator hose, radiator with e-fan and wiring harness. wedge bolt adjustment tubes for the rear suspension, still missing the panhard bar tube. Here is the new shock design, MUCH better.

Here is the engine in all of its glory. Again, I apologize, the pictures are out of order. I will give a run down of parts used in my final post for this update. The shocks shown with the headers were tossed in favor of a different design I will show when I post the chassis pics.

Bare with me while I learn how this forum works! I haven't changed photo hosting accounts or paid for photobucket since they broke the internet so I am uploading everything through the board. So photos may end up out of sequence, I'll do my best to tell the story! Here is the body. Very minimal mods. I decided not to open the trunk and roof flaps primarily due to time constraints to get this thing finished. So, I guess this isn't a true super detailed NASCAR build! You will notice the hood pin holes on the primed body and the painted body are different. I originally drilled where the molded in pins were, only to realize this location was way too high on the hood, so those holes were filled and new holes drilled closer to the edge.

I was invited here by another member, top.secret. It seems that Automotive Forums has pretty much died. I used to post over there regularly circa 2007 or so. I have been out of the Hobby for quite some time. I decided to get back to modelling last November after seeing a post from the model car club I used to be a member of promoting their Showdown in March. So, with that I dug out some old projects and this was the one that I decided I would make a push to finish up for the show. I used to be a huge NASCAR fan, pre 2001, so I have fun building these things. I spent a lot of time watching Dave Thibodeau and Clay Kemp build amazing NASCAR builds. From a competition stand point, you just can't beat a race car build for the wow factor. So, you may see a lot of stuff here that they do/did on builds because I use their builds as reference as well as "the bar" to reach. I started this build in late 2006, before I moved and all of my stuff went into storage for the better part of a decade. It was always my intention to enter this at the MCMA Showdown competition and that is where you will be able to find it, March 3rd in Dallas, TX. I chose a short track build because I felt it offers more area for detail. I chose the 2006 Spring Martinsville race as my reference car, as I wanted to use the black and green paint scheme. It was also to winning scheme at Pocono that year, however, I didn't want to attempt those body mods. The only part of the kit "cage" that was used were the door bars and interior tins. I re-built the front bars and bumper supports, as well as the greenhouse area. This is how it went into storage. Sitting there, waiting for me to come back and finish it!