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Surprise, Surprise, wldnas is adding a new showroom entry after many years of inactivity, now don’t get too excited just cos of one new posting… this does not necessarily mean that I’m making a full comeback, far from it, this is just a mere Blip as I still don’t have the disposable income that I used to when I was a active TC member buying 2-3 cars a month… those days are well and truly gone, these days I have a mortgage and that swallows up the £400 a month that I used to have to play with, the rest of my spare cash (& time) is spend travelling up to Bury every fortnight to do my voluntary duties for Project D8233 and work on D8233, D5705 & D9531, theses being series long term restoration projects that are ongoing….

Anyway overt the last couple of weeks I’ve been into the loft where my extensive collection is stored and I’ve got out a few of my cars that are in need of attention and working on them bit at a time, the first thing I did is my Monogram Lightning project, a few months ago I was contacted through TC by someone who had a Monogram Lightning they had that didn’t work, they were asking me about tips to get the original built in radio gear to work, I gave them a few pointers then suggested that they rip out the original RC gear and retro fit a real RC Proportional system & ESC, well anyway after that I got to thinking, I have two Lightning’s, a nearly boxed one and a used one that was intact but didn’t work, so made up my mind to practice what I preach and got the car down and stared modifying it, I will probably put up a full report of how I did it but there were a few issues that I had to overcome, but I succeeded and the car is now drivable, the handling isn’t too great though, it has massive under steer that is probably due to the solid rear axle (no-diff) so I have it in mind to swap the rear end for something else…. But that’s another story.

Next thing I’ve set my mind on is fixing my Wild Willy 1 (LW that has been broken since I last drove it at one of the TC spring drive meetings at Kidderminster, basically the steering bell crank (Part J1) has split through the hole for the tie-rod screw, now I have need of another so if anyone out there has one to speare let me know please I also noticed that the winch on the front grille on my WW1 is wrong, I did not have the original one so I fitted a spare one from a Marui Super Wheely that I had, it’s of a slightly different design but at a distance it looked the part, anyway I’ve found that I had acquired a correct type WW1 winch, and decided to fit it, only problem the front grille assembly is glued together I did manage to prize the radiator mounding off with minimal damage and I had to pick off one of the headlights, swapping the winch was a piece of cake but I have no super glue to can’t glue the grille assembly back together at the moment so that’s another job for another time…

Now the latest thing I’ve got going on is something that always bugged me about certain RC car manufacturers… When you get a car that has a beautiful picture on the top of the box showing a fancy design with lots of fancy stripes and a complicated paint scheme, then you open the box and find that the decal set does not include the fancy stripes only a basic set of decals that apply to a plainly painted body, this really gets my goat, Tamiya manage to make decal stripes that when applied makes the car look like the box art, why can’t other makers do the same, anyway I have a few such cars in my collection and two I’ve decided to do something about, one is my Kyosho Optima pro, the box art is very striking, its yellow with brown stripes and panelling with white pin striping and orange boundaries around some of the stripes, now the strips are quite complex to reproduce and there are others on TC who have tried to duplicate them with varying success, also the Decals shown on the box art, you don’t get some of them with the cars decal sheet, that’s another thing that annoys me anyway I decided to have a go at reproducing the original look of the car, now my Optima Pro is one of my original cars from back in the Late 80’s I got it in a swap with a kid at the top of my road where I used to live in Rugby and I swapped my original Tamiya Lunchbox for it, anyway it came to me with a blown ESC and I never managed to get it going and to this day its never turned a wheel in anger in my ownership, the chassis is pretty much as was and all I’ve done to it is fit a replacement set of wheels with some rally car tires on and fitted a Kamtec aftermarket body shell, I did acquire a new set of decals for this car but as I said they did not have all the decals needed to fully reproduce the box art, anyway to recreate the stripes I decided to draw the outlines onto the outside of the shell with a CD writer pen, I tried to copy them as best I could, then when that was done I painted all the stripes by brush with Black PC paint on the inside of the shell, now I did make a slight Boo-Boo here as I was using a B&W photocopy of the box art and the dark stripes seemed to be black, only after I Painted it did I look at a colour picture of the box art and realised that the dark stripes are in fact BROWN with white pin stripes and orange edging… :S anyway I carried on regardless, I had some Yellow spray paint to spray the body and under tray with and after wards I applied the decals, Now I managed to find some other spare Kyosho decals in my Ultima, Raider and Pegasus boxes and using these I’ve managed to duplicate the decal look reasonably well, the final task was to apply the white pin striping which I did by hand and looks like a right dogs dinner… but then I was using some very gloopy Tamiya PC brush paint and a brush that could have done with being a little smaller, still the overall end result it quite pleasing and my Optima Pro looks 200% better for it, now I’ve not finished with this car… the chassis really needs a thorough strip and clean and when that’s done I can finally fit some RC gear and see how this baby runs but that another job for another time yet again…

Finally I have my SG Coyote body, now this car has one of the most striking paint schemes of any car, however its also horrendously complicated to reproduce mainly due to the chequered design over the roof, now I have a unused clear lexan body for my Coyote and using the same technique I did with the Optima Pro body I’ve drawn out the lines and cheques of the body design and so far painted the white areas as this is currently the only colour that I have the others (Dark Blue, Mid Blue & Red) I will have to try and source so it’s a start I guess

Anyway here then are some of the pictures of what I’ve been upto, now I was wondering is there a TC meet (spring Drive ala Kidderminster) planned for this year at all, if so when is it as it will need to be on one of my weekends off so that I can attend, so if anyone knows of any midlands based events I’d be interested in making an appearance