HG-P407 "Bruiser Clone" Arrived Today!

[Dadio]

You know what the Tamiya black bumper set is on eBay for £12.50 delivered , no brainer !

[XLR8]

[Dadio]

I'll post pictures but there's little worth seeing yet just the front grill, lower valence and interior , none of it is finished .
I'm really tempted to half open a window or fully opening one and half opening the other , not sure yet .

[XLR8]

[Dadio]

It should be pretty easy to cut out a whole window , its doing one half open that will be tricky , I get two attempts and at worst both windows will be open fully .
The tyres arrived today only £15,98 delivered ,Austar AX -3021, so I pulled off the stock ones (glued but fairly easy) and tried them out , they came with some fairly hard foams and I want this to crawl a bit so I left them out and for the price I'm really impressed , way better than stock , I'll post pictures soon .

[XLR8]

[Dadio]

I think the theory is that the steering is so sloppy that a hard tire that's radiuses across the tread would ride on only the centre of the tread making steering easier .
I'd never heard of that brand of tyre either but I saw a recommendation on I think it was Clod Talk so I had a little surf and found that they were much better than the price might suggest , not top of the line but good enough for me , sorry about being slow on pictures but I've been a little ill .

[Dadio]

I'm finally feeling a bit better (6 day stomach virus ) and paint and parts are arriving so i had a little energy to get started yesterday so i fitted the rubber arch extenders (fenders for you American's ) , very fiddly drilling a ton of 1.5 mm holes , the arches were very cheap , under £10 delivered but they look nice, well moulded ,good enough fit and came with all the hex screws and nuts to fit them , i think they cover the wheels just enough to please the eye . The body is keyed so ill strip it today and start the rust effects , I'm going to try a technique called salting , I've never tried it before , basically you first paint on the rust effect over a slightly larger area than you want , allow to dry then wet the area you want to see rust and add fine salt over it , allow to dry then spray over with the top coat , allow to dry then use a wet sponge to wash away the salt leaving the rust effect showing , look it up on youtube its fascinating to see done ,I'm only going for rusty bits not the full on Rat look .

[Dadio]

Firstly i need to loos a couple of screw holes in the door so out with the filler .

[XLR8]

[Dadio]

Full size car body filler , nothing special and begins setting in 5 min , very easy to work , only problem I had was mixing a small quantity , the ideal is a pea of hardener to a golf ball of filler , I was using about a pea of filler ! I cut a piece of lexan and used it just as the filler was going off to get the door edge groove , with body filler there's this Goldy locks moment as it begins to set when you can cut and model it just a little.

[Dadio]

Bu@#℅r ! Should have got three cans of white paint ! Not at all sure two is going to do it , I'm so used to polycarb paint that gives huge coverage that I thought it would be enough , I might be stalled waiting for a can of paint

[Dadio]

I had just enough paint after all
I got the rust affects and the top coat done this afternoon so its window edges ,door handles and stuff to do and some grimy washes . I'll post pictures tomorrow as its got too late now but I'm quite pleased with my first attempt at rust .

[Dadio]

Still loads to do but here's where I am . I'm going to muddy up the bed and dirty up the body generally as well.

[Basher67]

That's really looking good! Any chance you could post a good side profile pic? I really like those tires and would like to see how the size compares with the originals.