puddingwrestler

It's a Toyopet crown. There is a full build up thread in the workbench section.

Here are some photos of the chopping process. I like to keep a good record of this sort of thing so I can either go back over it if it goes wrong or use it as reference next time I do this sort of thing. Anyway, here the nose has been removed, and a firewall glued on. It'll be shaped later, at the moment it's just there to add strength to the body shell. The windshield and front section of the new body has also been removed, and a piece of scrap styrene superglued to the rear body for strength while about 11mm of body is cut out. Here's the result - the body is now in three pieces (or six if you count the material removed from doors and roof, all of which is now in the spare parts bin. The nose will also end up there since it'll not be used on this project. And here it is glued back together. I found I didn't need to remove the roof as it lined up almost perfectly with the windshield. The roof was a little taller, but removing the pillars allowed me to flex it slighlty into place. Obviosuly the window frames will be removed (I left them on for strength while handling the seperate parts), and the rear window opening resaped into a smoother, sleeker look.

When planning a project like this, I like to do a digital chop job to work out the best places to cut and how things will look afterwards. First, I take a side view photo against a neutral background (in this case, the back of my Laptop - it's red so it goes faster) Next I get ti into a photo manipulation program. Photoshop, or, in this case, GIMP (which is free, so if you don't have photoshop you can still do this). At this stage, I always black out the windows so that the pesky pillars on the other side don't get distracting. Then I use the polygon lasso (in Photoshop) or the Pen Path and Slect From Path options (in GIMP) to cut the photo up and move bits around. This is basically the same as using a saw, but without touching plastic. THis lets me see how things will work on the model. Here I've cut the front of the car off, shortened the whole thing by basically removing most of the front door and brinding the A pillar bckwards, modified the top a little to fit and reshaped the rear window openings. It'll be convertede to two door in the model, but for the pic I didn't bother.

Well chaps, this is the third of the SOCC founder members. So far I don't have a name for it. BAsically it'll be a Prince Gloria Super 6 done up as a roadster with tonneau cover, like the late 50s Thunderbirds. I'll be converting it to two-door, lowering and doing a few other body mods, but nothing really decided yet. I intend to work on it inbetween waiting for the wild wasabi to dry. As to the name, I was thinking of trying to go with a bird theme, since I'm trying to make a sort of Japanese Thunderbird look. Possibly something to do with Pheonix or Crane as I associate those with Japan. If anyone has any ideas (or knows any righteously cool Japanese bird names) let me know. Oh, BTW; Arii 1/32 kit, and looks like this.

IN a spectacular piece of good timing, I finished off the Tofudabeest, got home from work this arvo and found a suspicious package wrapped in brown paper and tied with flouro green string in the letterbox. Seeing as the post mark said Hong Kong and it wasn't ticking, I knew it was not a bomb sent by some bitter modeling rival but the long awaited Arii kits I had been waiting for at length. Which means the other two founder members of the SOCC can be built! I always planned three founder members, with more to follow if I feel inspired by anything particular. One each of the 50s Custom, 50s/60s Hot Rod and 60s mild custom styles. This is the story of the Hot Rod. Made from a Mazda Carol. Of all things. A while ago, I found this blog entry about a pair of Japanese uni students making a Mazda Carol hotrod for an assignment. And lo it was awesome. So I had to do something like it. The basis of the machine is an Arii 1/32 Mazda Carol Patrol Car Type (the normal kit, but with a flashing light on the roof and some police decals). This will provide the body and some interior parts, but it's a fairly basic kit. Anyway, the Carol is rear engined, and I want front engine, so things will get heavily modified anyway. Chassis will be kit thrashed. Engine will be a flathead Ford from a Tamiya gun tractor. A lot of the worky-bits will come from 1/35 military kits since I don't have much of a stash of 1/32 car parts. I've never made a chassis before, but I think I know what I'm doing First thing to do (after rummaging around for the parts in the stash) is to modify the body, chopping it off infront of the firewall, shortening it a bit, shopping the top etc. Anyway, I know what I'm doing over the mid semester break. And it involves lime green paint.

That all depends on how you add them. If you attach them, they may be size modified. If, like me, you upload them somewhere else and then link to them, they are not resized in anyway. I always resize down to 800X600 using GIMP or Photoshop, but I have seen people who simply upload from their cameras - this means there pics are generally at least 2000 pixels across, making them considerably bigger than the screen. So if you are like me, and upload your pics to your own web space and then link them, get yourself a copy of GIMP - it's free, and use that to resize images. It's very easy, and provides a good opportuntity to review your pics before you post them, and also allows you to crop them so that they only show what you want them to. You can also generally improve the clarity of the picture by adjusting things like white balance and light levels to get the pic as close to life as possible.

Ah, the Aurora B-58... you know you're watching Gerry Anderson when you see parts of the Aurora B-58... I did somethign similar to those ambulances earlier this year without realising I was using a GA technique. I used Grumman Avenger fuselages and a 1/32 Mazda three wheeler truck, the inspiration came from the very first Nemesis The Warlock story. Always loved the cars turning up in Thunderbirds. YEars ago I read '21st Century Visions' by Derek Meddings, the special effects guy on the series who talked about how they made the 1/25 model cars behave like life sized versions. The suspension were made from pencil erasers if I recall correctly (I was only about ten when I read the book in the mid 90s)

On closer inspection (ie: a hobby shop crawl mounted on Saturday) Melbourne's hobbyshops have not got many US cars in. All other areas are just as full as before including Japanese car kits, but very few american ones. I couldn't find even one kit of a 1950s pickup, apart from Revell's F1, which was not right for the project I had in mind... Kasey: The barbecue is the front end of a HZ Holden Monaro GTS circa 1978-79. Holdens of that era have American-esque styling, but are 100% australian in design. Link to pic of full car here.

Well chaps, it's done. And you can have a squizz here.

Well, the Tofudabeest is done, and since the Mazda Carrol I need for the sequel has not arrvied from Hong Kong yet I'm at a loose end... Anyway, here's pics: I had a few spots of bother near the end. Soem glue appears to have fallen on the roof after I'd polished and waxed it, so I sanded back and re-polished. It's better, but short of a respray it'll never be perfect. And one of the windshield wipers snapped when I cut it from the spure for installation. Sigh. And from the looks of the pics, I forgot to BMF the bumpers. Oh well, I'll get round to that.

An interesting conundrum. Parts of the body look like plastic, but the pin stripes look real... THe wheels and seat also look more real to me... could be the light making a real body look plasticy, and I think the pinstripes do not help, they look sorta like highlights around the edges making for a more plasticy look. I voted real, but I've been wrong before.

There is indeed a police version. Arii seems to make police and taxi versions of most of thier 1/32 releases. There's a police Beetle and a police version of teh Subaru 360(!) I've shot the first coupla coats of blue, shot the silver yesterday. Also got the hub caps on the go. They're made from 7mm googly eyes, painted silver on the inside. COuld use BMF, but I'm not confident about getting the round shape to work. COuld use Alclad, but I don;t have that, or teh requisite airbrush.

Mine's actually the taxi versionof the kit, but the onyl difference seems to be that it comes with a taxi sign fro teh roof. Well, the instructions show one, I can't seem to spot the piece in the kit anywhere... Steve - I'm not lowering mine anywhere near as far as yours. I've dropped it about 2-3 scale inches, basically as far as the wheel wells in the kit allow, so it's still realistically driveable wihtout having to use pneumatic suspension for adjustabel ride hieght.

The world has been conspiring against me - it's report writing week (I'm a teacher) so I've been putting in long hours, it gets dark around 6, being mid winter down here, and my rented house's shed has no lights. As a result, I have had the Tofudabeest ready to paint since Tuesday, but never managed to get it painted... Fortunately tommorow is Saturday, and after I have staged a mighty and epic hobby shop crawl (which will net me the raw materials for my next insane project) and visited my wargames club I'll get the first coats of paint on. It'll be two tone silver and light metallic blue, all auto touch up rattle cans.

It has that sort of barking mad miniatuirsed insanity I usually associate with Mitsouka from Japan... Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of barking mad japanese miniturised insanity I suppose... Well built sir!

Well, most video game cars look just like the real versions. I mean, you might decide tyo build a model of a car you loved in Gran Tourismo or some such, but it'll just look like that car in real life really.

Very nice. Not really a truck anymore is it I notice a lot of your models tend to have a very flat-topped rear treatment - is this a concious styling choice to tie all your work together, or does it just tend to happen?

#2 is wearing Victorian (Australian) club historics number plates which means it's from the land down under. Although we didn't really have a car industry till post war, we did have a coach building industry, so it's most likely something American but wearing a slighlty different Australian body. This might help, not sure.

Why go to the expense? PLywood sheet looks like it'd do the job just fine!

Pudding wrestling is basically just a very violent and full-contact way of eating dessert. I've had the name for years; I used to be a really big dessert fan, but I've cut back a little recently.

Awesome! Where's the grille come from? I'm suprised the wheels even fit

You know if you watch Mad Max carefully (the original one, NOT Mad Max II aka The Roadwarrior), you NEVER see the left hand side of the interceptor. The producer took the just finished car for a spin the day before filming and scraped that side up badly driving far to close to a curbful of dustbins... No time to fix it, so they had to film that way. Of course, they did fix it up for the second film, but the car was meant to look beaten up by then so it probably would not matter. In the first film, it's just been built and is shiny factory painted.

Model Expo here in Melbourne has three classes for every type of model - Out of Box, Enhanced OOB and Open. OOB must be built exaclty as per instructions, Enhanced can have minor modifications like non-stock wheels, aerials added to AFVs etc. Open has not restrictions and runs the gammut from mild custom work to completely scratch built pro-street hearses with jet-engines and warp nacelles...

egads. Words have failed me. And as an English teacher (who cannot spell and doesn't proof read forum posts) you can imagine how hard it is for words to fail me.

Did someone get a set square for chirstmas? Or was the designer a fundamentalist anti-french curv-ist?