I have to return this thread to the front.
And what better way. This car has been done for about a year now, but only now could I get the pics ready for the web. I had already shown some progress of this in the collectors thread, but now It's the whole deal.
It's gonna be a VERY long post as it will show you the entire process of how this car came to be, so brace yourselves for 5 mb of pics, and read the stuff please, it took me ages to type all that lol.
The thing started out as this poor, poooor Majorette Renault Alpine A310 cop car I grabbed off a flea market for like 50 cents.
I had always wanted to do one of these as a race/track car, so I penned a little something.
With the concept the car was gonna follow, it was time to get wrenchin'. Here it is torn apart:
As you can see, there wasn't much paint stripping to do, really. Majorettes have this typical flaw in their paint, it comes off like chips. big chips.
First thing I did was finding a set of wheels I liked; these slicks came out a poor
Racing Champions INDY car I also found at the flea market and bought specifically to take it's wheels out.
It looked fine with the body on, so I decided on these (had another few options, but these looked nice).
But they "danced" on the axle, they had too much play, look:
so I made a set of "spacers" with some cable:
So, the wheels really filled the wheelwells and made the flared fenders look like they were put to good use:
Next step was to file away the cop light:
It was gonna be an almost straight repaint/resto, but then I found this engine off a donor
Piledriver in the parts box:
And my mind began to roll. V12 Alpine? I test-fitted it:
And it looked cool! But there were two problems: first, the bootlid did not open originally, and second, the interior of the car got in the way. Well, the bootlid was made to open by filing away the tips that held it in place, but letting them poke out enoug that they'd still hold the lid closed when pressed down:
As for the interior, well, the old Dremel took care of that. It hurt to cut a 30-year-old part, but oh well...
The engine had to be modified too, so the Dremel once again...
here's the test-fit with some clay:
And while I was messing with the interior, I made seat belts,
leather seatbelts mind you, out of an old belt I had lying around, whose sides were peeling away. I cut the leather strip in half and measured...
And voilá; of course, that isn't the final fitting:
So, by now this thing was getting pretty crazy, so more custom parts were on the way. I found a rear spoiler off a donor
Super Modified and started working with the Dremel to make a rear diffuser out of it...
And here it is. Top you can see the stock part, bottom is the new diffuser made out of the wing.
And here is how it attached to the car:
And how it looked with it.
Along the way, the thing also adopted the front spoiler of the Super Modified as a rear wing, here is the clay mock up:
And then, I decided to put some exhaust on the car, so the rear diffuser was reworked to house a pair of ballpen tips:
Now that aaaaall the custom stuff on the car was ready, it was time for paint.
However, one last custom step had to be taken: filling in the rooflight hole. This was achieved by cutting a small piece of Coke aluminum can and placing it inside the car, on it's roof, then filling the hole with sodium bicarbonate and adding a drop of Krazy glue to it. This generates a chemical reaction that produces an incredibly hard substance. It was then filed away until it was flush with the body:
And a very thick primer (called filling primer) was applied to the top of the car in order to make the hole disappear. Then came paint, and omg it looked SO DIFFERENT! I chose the flat black-over-yellow theme based on
several Alpine rally cars that ran troughout the 70s.
The interior was also painted black...
As was the chassis:
Then the detailing started! The inside of the car's interior was painted flat black too, so it wouldn't look like the door panels were yellow, lol; in this picture you can see the aluminum plate used to fill the hole in the roof, also painted black:
I also painted the window moldings and side air intakes in flat black, by hand:
The mirrors were given a chrome touch:
The engine was detailed:
And the seats were painted flat red and had the seatbelts installed:
The wing was installed in the bootlid (yes, it's support is offset):
And the rear diffuser had the exhaust tips glued on:
Oh, and since the original steering wheel was a flat piece of plastic, a Hot Wheels 65 Mustang gave up it's wheel for the cause, and it was also detailed:
The entire interior piece was then assembled:
And the very delicate final assembly began...
The final product of aaaaaaaaaaaaall this looks like this:
The mirrors:
The chips in the wing you see here came when the car was assembled, it was all later touched up:
The freaking diffuser, which gives the car a lot of its track persoanlity:
And then, with the bootlid open showing the engine. The lid was hinged with nothing more than a piece of transparent tape lol:
The engine bay:
And there it is. This car is the most complex project I've done to date, and I was very very pleased with the result. Hope you all like it (: