Puddingwrestler's Wild Wasabi

[puddingwrestler]

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.

[puddingwrestler]

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.

[puddingwrestler]

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.

[stevegt738]

This will be fun.

[puddingwrestler]

I've got the body stuck together and puttied nicely, although it still needs some of the moldings removed and the windows reshaped. Unfortunately, the Ford Flathead V8 I want to use doesn't appear to be in my stash. I think it might be at my parents' house (I left some stuff behind when I moved out a few years ago, and the Quad tractor box was one of the things I left).

[puddingwrestler]

Been fiddling around with the body a bit more, and I've started work on the interior.

Since I shortened the body, I'm removing the front bucket seats and just using the rear bench. Which I'm reworking to tuck and roll. I've also shortened the interior side panels and started to tuck and roll those. I think the bench has a more traditional hotrod look, which is what I am aiming for.

And the school holidays have just kicked in, so there'll be more time to play with this in the coming fortnight. Huzzah!

[Foxer]

That's pretty cool. Was a nice alignment putting the body back together. One nice thing, from here it looks like 1/25!

[puddingwrestler]

That's pretty cool. Was a nice alignment putting the body back together. One nice thing, from here it looks like 1/25!

I wish - just imagine how big that'd make the laptop in the background!

[puddingwrestler]

Here's a pic of the Wasabi interior down up in simple traditional tuck and roll.

I intend to leave the dash stock. The carpets will be lime green to match the exterior, and the upholstery will most likely be white. There are a few details to sort out, but this is basically how it'll look.

[puddingwrestler]

not much happening on this one at present. I've finished filling extraneous panel lines on the body and fixed up the floor (I cut a bit too much off when I shortened it) and sanded off the rear wheel arches. THe rear wheels will be larger tan the arches and live outside in the open. I can't really do too much more until I get the engine.