Mr. Turbo

Awesome work, lots of fun ideas in there. Like someone let Franco Sbarro near a Camaro! Reminds me of his 1983 Golf Turbo where the body pivots up to access the rear engine.

I've been tempted by these, thanks for the photos and info. Nice build! Watching the gold Cedric taking shape, too - looking sweet. I have my eye on the '71 Cedric 2-door HT.

Yep Silhouettes, aka Impul D-01. The Work Equip 02/"3Negative" is a little different. Kyusha Shoes is one of my favorite parts sites.

Thanks Philippe and Kurt! And wow, that's cool Nigel, better looking than I remember. A good basis for full bosozoku maybe? They wouldn't use that grille though. Anyway, it works better than the BMW Celica.

Man, that's cool. It's hard to unsee the box art once you've seen it but I applaud your vision. Super classy but with muscle car undertones. ?

Very nice work! Love the super sonic blue, might have to try that.

Wow, ambitious but not rubbish at all! Great WIP thread - excellent inspiration for custom bodywork.

Thanks, guys. Means alot. Glad to have somewhere to put these pictures. Glad anyone actually looked at all of them. Gareth - I do like to get really close in some of the photos, especially during the build. More than once I saw something in a photo that I could barely see with my eyes. The better I make it, the more flaws I see: way too-thick paint, those panel gaps (which, due to the thick paint, are now like smooth valleys between hills.) Amazed with myself that I got it this far, though, so I'm happy. Nigel - I saw one of those Benz-face kits, pretty awesome in a terrible way. I think I also saw a BMW-faced Celica at one point. The JDM equivalent of our Roller-grilled VW Beetles!

First off, I'm sorry for the totally ridiculous number of photos and for the WIP images in there. I had a hard time paring it down from over a hundred, so this is progress for me. I was really experimenting with the taking of the pictures in addition to the build. And my work progress wasn't too interesting or anything you hadn't seen before so I didn't think it really deserved its own thread. Sorry, again - I'll try to be more selective next time. A link to some kind of album is probably better. But it's my first kit in 20-odd years so let me have this one. Here it is, the godawful boring Toyota Crown Turbo Super Saloon of 1980. Thought it might be fun to build something I would never look at twice. Like a blank canvas for my screwups. Also, I spent some time in Japan in my 20's and have a soft spot for their car culture over there. I think it did something to me, the day a friend took me to see a Toyota 2000GT parked outside at a dealer just on the side of the road next to a BMW Glas 1300, an Isuzu 117, a Delta Integrale, and a line of vintage Skylines. You don't just park stuff like that on the sidewalk. But they do there. Because there is nowhere else. WasabiCars and Speedhunters are also great sources of inspiration. Reference car and inspiration. Note the custom panel between the taillights on the red car and the relocated plate. Just to be extra low. Checking the stance, trying out colors. Leaving the stock kit wheels on the sedan. For now. This was a big deal for me - cutting out a sunroof and getting the 'glass' to sort of fit. Headlight cups (made for real bulbs) looked terrible behind the lenses...something was needed. Also tried to do the thin chrome side trim with masking and a Molotow pen...didn't quite work. BMF better. Flashcube innards make great headlight reflector cups. Thanks 1970's! The results: Intro to Scratchbuilding. Seatbelt buckles, speaker bodies and JDM-style seat covers made from dollhouse curtains. Wildly out of scale unfortunately but this model is all about experimentation. I actually found an old white handkerchief with the perfect in-scale material. I may change it one day. I thought I was done with the interior... Until I saw this car for sale in Japan with my seat covers and a Nardi wheel. Kind of silly on this car but it looked so good I had to try and make one. The spokes and hub you can buy... But man, that black stripe is thin in 1/24 scale. 1st attempt with Tamiya yellow tape, 2nd attempt on the right with Tamiya white tape. And a center hub made from a snippet of blue window tint and several drops of clearcoat built up. Ok, finally, the car out in the open...a little dusty and polleny outside. Left the sunroof removable after I couldn't decide what position to glue it in. The only other piece of 'scratchbuilding' on the car, if you can call it that: rain visors made from 3mm nickel plated battery connector strips. I have a sack of like 100 if anyone needs some! In all her brownness. Custom Toyota City license plate I had printed. 3150 means "Best" in phonetic numbers. Custom vintage TOSCO Racing Equipment decal. For +5hp! In front of a little wall I made from a clipboard and crimped aluminum sheets. Sprayed bleach on them and left them in the sun for weathering. Actually corroded little holes! Tsurikawa (subway strap handle) and one of the hardest parts of the build - tiny strips of BMF along the edges of the fenders. Window tint is actual brown automotive tint film but very thin. One of my goals of this build was to be able to read "TURBO" on the grille. For obvious reasons. Because TURBO! The Crown badge was tougher. The black is Ceramcote acrylic. Too flat maybe. Look at that sweet digital display. Need something better for door gaps but I really need to get good at scribing deeper panel gaps. I tried, almost ruined everything, afraid to try again. I don't care. I like my chicken-wire-sized lace seat covers. Could not figure out how to glue the mirrors on the wings. Ended up drilling the posts and the fender and inserting thin paper clip clippings. Now they're adjustable, too. Experimenting with different focal lengths on my old digital camera. Used the smallest aperture to reduce blurring (increase depth of field) to make it look less a miniature. This one's wide-angle for bigness. And I know it's getting excessive but I had to play around with studio-style shots. If you've made it this far - here's a side view! Tried to make it look heavy on its wheels - not slammed with the rims tucked up under the fenders like on the box. Cold light from one side, warm from the other. Funky reflections... Mmm, those rain visors. I couldn't figure out how to make or attach them. I don't even know what they're glued to, maybe the window? Final detail. Fujimi's standard one-piece underside for a bunch of their sedans. Did a little weathering, a little masking. Could've done fender liners or painted the inner body black. My little photo setup, if anyone's curious. 3 crappy desk lamps, two gooseneck clips, lots of paper and a couple glass vases because they were within reach. And that's my brown car. Sorry again.

Love it. I've always been partial to re-purposing. I just recycled the insides of an old Flashcube for headlight cups. And I found a 50 cent rainbow anodized titanium nose ring that works perfect for a shift knob - thanks goth kids!

Looks great! Nice detail. I can almost see Huggy Bear in the barber shop.

Thanks again all. I've given some thought as to how good I want to try to be. Granted, there are heights I shall never reach. But I decided I wanted to at least better my teenage goals of "good enuf" and "pretty much looks like the box". It's a daunting personal and philosophical question: how good do I want to be? How good can I reasonably be expected to be? It's mind-bottling. Well, I found a good gauge. Last night I was going through the photos I had taken of the brown car when my girlfriend looked over my shoulder and said "Wow! Is that your car? Looks so real!" This is a woman who has had her eyes in a permanent eye roll since I started this again in the summer. She wasn't too impressed with any individual part I completed and she's seen the thing go together, but that reaction at the end was worth it. So that's the level I'll work to.

Thanks for the warm welcome! Great tips already - it's like...using the internet to grow knowledge, learn technique and make connections. Does anyone still use it for that? Makes me want to go troll a tiktok celebrity, just to balance it out. But yes - thanks already for the tips! I have learned more about paint in 2 months than the rest of my life put together. First, that yeah, it doesn't much matter how cool your details are if your paint job isn't nice. And your paint won't be nice if the body isn't prepped. Both the Fujimi and Tamiya kits needed a little TLC...minor sink marks, mold lines, the usual. Shame about Rustoleum - they seem to have all the colors I like and I haven't yet tried doing a whole body by airbrush or mixing my own colors. I've mostly been using it for interiors, window trim and small details like exhaust tips. The Tamiya paint on the other car definitely went on better. I do test the stuff beforehand on an old body. I know on real cars, I would never use coatings without hardeners and most stuff at Home Depot doesn't have em. Of course, I did exactly the same thing again, respraying with Rustoleum, because I'm stubborn and was sure I could make it work this time. It helped alot to leave it in the sun for a few hours each day for a coupe weeks before clearcoating. Not ideal though. So paint ends up being like 75% of my effort, 15% assembly and 10% fixing my screwups. Watching guys like Doctor Cranky on YouTube makes me want to cry, his paint is so good. Even glue, you know, glue, that stuff in the orange Testors tube. Even that's complicated now. I learned Tamiya plastic cement only bonds bare plastic. C/A glue can't be used anywhere near clear or chrome, so now I use epoxy everywhere during final assembly which is a pain to have to mix up every time but it's so much better it's not even a question. And the learning continues...

What was I thinking, trying to build model cars again? My name is JJ and like more than a few other people here, I decided to build something for the first time since I was a teenager (now in my 40's). I always thought the Japanese kits looked so cool with their flat boxes and art that never showed the actual model - mysterious! And all those tools and supplies with that double-star Tamiya logo - love it. So I went and looked at what I could get for the smallest amount of money which turned out to be a couple of $10 Toyotas. Challenge Accepted!! It was going great until I went to mask trim on my polished brown Crown Turbo and realized the Rust-Oleum had never cured underneath the clearcoat, even after a month. So my first post is my first experience with Purple Power, yay! It's also been my first experience with airbrushing, flocking, scratchbuilding, Alclad, window masking, making mexican blankets, and printing decals. I don't know how people find time to YouTube themselves doing all these things but I'm grateful for their efforts. That took more than a week, leaving a fascinating marbled appearance. Thought about trying to use that somehow but decided nah. Posting finished photos soon!

Sweet, thanx!

Nice work! Perfect 70's feel - is that a custom-mixed color?

Nice one! The wheels, I think, are called Work Equip 02's or Silhouettes. I was just about to put a slightly different set on a Fujimi 1980 Crown, glad to see they look right!