Project F-Bomb: Reimagining a WLToys 144001

[Coelacanth]

I found some good pictures on the 'net and was able to put together some stickers. These are all approximately to-scale relative to each other; I'll just need to scale down to properly fit the body, which just takes some draft printouts and a bit of trial-and-error until they're suitably sized. The car will be mostly pink so I've attempted to make chrome emblems on a pink background, it won't be perfect but hopefully close enough. It's much easier to do this for a black car, like I did with my Grand National build, because a black sticker background matches the body color much better.

This ends up looking way more realistic than trying to paint headlights...because you're using pics of real headlights and such.

[klavy69]

I don't usually go much into this section but that escort body made it worthwhile

[Coelacanth]

Here's a fun update for this project. Well, the front shock towers on this chassis got in the way of mounting an on-road body as low as I wanted. I tried everything I could think of and there was still too much clearance between the front fenders and the tires. Clearly this build will have to be a tad rally-inspired because the rear tires protrude past the fenders, so the tires won't be able to snug inside the fenders with full shock compression...but I still wanted a way to lower the front of the body more than what I could do with the shock towers. What to do? I started out by cutting a rectangular hole so the body would fit lower and allow the shock towers to poke through. That would look like ass, though, so after some more thinking, I decided to see if installing a hood scoop would do the trick. It's kind of ironic for the muscle car guys because that's what you had to do to give you clearance for your tall air cleaners or high-rise manifolds, back in the days of carburetion.

As it happens, Pro-Line sells a Lexan hood scoop set with several scoop designs for their No-Prep drag racing bodies, it was only about $25 at the LHS, and they had a template you could download and print from their website, so I was able to determine one of the scoop designs would work perfectly. I've cut it down so it's a lot shorter front-to-rear than the original, as I only needed the part of the scoop that includes the rear part (closest to the windshield), keeping in mind this is only a 1:14-scale car.

Here's the test-fit of the scoop Scotch-taped into position. The body posts aren't quite tweaked perfectly yet but it's getting there. It's gonna look awesome when the hood & scoop are all painted matte black...and the shock tops might actually look like twin turbos peeking out from under the scoop.

[Coelacanth]

Finally got the body painted. As I'm building this for my 11-year-old daughter, I asked her what colors and how she wanted it painted. "Pink, purple, sparkles...and unicorns." Sheesh...I wanted the body to look cool and aggressive, so this was not going to be easy. Here's what I came up with, I don't think it had as much pink as she would've liked, but it came out looking pretty good. The stickers I made from pictures of 1978-ish Ford Escort RS2000's I found online certainly give it a more realistic appearance.

The hood scoop I added isn't original, but was needed for the shock towers to clear the hood. I think it adds to the look though...very late 60's/early 70's muscle-car-esque.

[mikea96]

That's cool looking and those wide fenders look awesome.

[Coelacanth]

Thanks Mike! I knew I wanted this body as soon as I discovered it was available to fit the 144001...because you could turn it into a rally car as the chassis is meant for off-road, so the extra wheel-well clearance wouldn't look too awkward.