Rescuing another hard case

[RedScampi]

So, a couple of weeks ago my friend Rick (bearrickster) asked me kind of jokingly why I wasn't working on Losi's instead of RC10's. That was because I had recently purchased a few Losi cars from Rick as well as some Ebay Losi cars but all my threads have Rc10's or Kyosho's so far. Well, here you go Rick! I'm not done with this yet but I'm far enough that i know it's going to turn out decent. This was one of the E-bay cars I bought. It looked a bit tough in the auction pictures, and I wasn't surprised to see that the pictures didn't lie. The body was unpainted but looked like it had been around the block a few times anyway. Someone had cut off the sides of the rear end so the top of it was unsupported and pretty much useless. It still took me a while to decide to remove it. The worst things about the car were a large irregular hole at the front of the nose and what looked like a cigarette burn in the very tip. Besides that the chassis was full of extra holes and had some very deep, ugly gouges in the bottom, as well as some super glue trails. The front shock tower was glued to another fiberglass longer one and there were some weird red shocks on the front. I decided that this would be a good candidate to try something I had wanted to do for a while. I sanded the chassis smooth then filled most of the extra holes and the gouges with JB-weld, sanded again then applied a fake carbon fiber sheet I had left over from another project to both sides of the chassis. Then I trimmed it up and cleared the material out of the holes. It looks nice i think, probably wouldn't hold up to bottoming out on anything though. I cleaned up the front shock tower and reinstalled it and bolted the suspension back on with new stainless screws. I grabbed a set of front shocks from another car. The i turned my attention to the body. I first opened up the hole in the front with a sanding drum making it uniform and slightly sausage shaped. I used shoe goo and scrap Lexan to make a patch that fits in the hole and covered it with a sticker. I cleaned up all the body edges and hacked off the back end then i got out the plastic polish and went to work. I grabbed rolling stock from a car I bought on this forum. It's never going to win any show and shine awards but it looks a hell of a lot better! The paint scheme is inspired from another car I saw but not identical. It has a good Losi flavor to it i think. Anyway, that's more than enough rambling, enjoy the pics!

[Mr. ED]

good job dude

I especially like the chasiis restoration and the paintwork. How did you mage to keep the curevd lines smooth and parallel?

[aip47-2008]

Very nice!

What kind of material was used to restore the chassis? And is it commonly available?

[RedScampi]

Thanks guys. The paint lines were laid out by hand with Pactra striping tape that I got from my local LHS. Unfortunately I had some paint lift on the blue stripe because I was in a hurry (again) and I had to add a tape stripe on top of the body. The color is indistinguishable from the fluorescent blue that I used. The material I used on the chassis is just adhesive backed carbon fiber look sheet that I found at the local Autozone. It should be easy to get anywhere.

[RedScampi]

I found a picture of the nose of the body. What an eyesore!

[pituk]

Wow , nice save. I'm lucky to do a straight paint line on the body.

[RedScampi]

Thanks man. I figured I didn't have a lot to lose on this one so I treated it as a practice session. Laying out parallel lines is part art, part patience and part luck I'm finding. The last body I did had straight lines right up the top of the car and over the roof. They were actually more difficult to do by hand than these were since any little flaw was very obvious. I ended up measuring those with a ruler. The most important part is to take your time! I'm guilty of rushing the job since I'm really into instant gratification.