As you saw in the photos, the body had certainly seen better days and was missing most of its paint. Although I neglected to get any pictures of this, I stripped off what was left of the remaining paint with paint stripper, fortunately, it didn’t need much since most of it was already gone. If you look at
this photo here, you can see the casting has casting lines on the hood and part of the fenders and it had it some near the back, which you cannot see in that photo. I found these to be a bit distracting, so I filed them down. (sorry for lack of pictures)
Here it is with a new coat of primer.
^As you can see the casting lines are gone now and it looks a lot better. I will admit though, I kind of messed up on the fenders a bit and you can tell in this photo, but fortunately, the hood turned out great! The metal on this one is considerably thinner than most Hot Wheels castings I have worked with in the past. I didn’t bother filling in the hole on the top because I hope to one day put something there and I didn’t think filling it in was worth the effort anyway.
Upon doing some research, I learned this casting was originally metallic green. I wanted something reminiscent of what it had originally while giving it a new and improved look. So I chose Testors Mystic Emerald for this one because I felt this was perfect for it. And here it is with the aforementioned new color:
^I detailed the turn signals, door handles, and even the Volkswagen letters on the back after I finished painting it. It was pretty tricky, but I eventually got it.
I will admit, I had
numerous mishaps with painting this thing and I had to strip and redo it multiple times before I got it to what you see here. While it still has some imperfections, namely the front having some small pores and the silver going a little off from the turn signals, it’s not a huge deal, so I left it alone because I felt it wasn’t worth the risk of ruining it again.