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The Maxima needed major surgery involving a complete strip clean, I made a new rear suspension bulkhead out of some impact resistant plastic and I touched up the paint scheme with some additional decals, fitted a rear wing and installed electrics to make it a runner, now later on I would acquire a PB Mini-Mustang and later a 2nd one that I sold on and later still a third one that came with a large lot of spares that too I passed on, I’ve also bought a 2nd Maxima and on swapping over the missing parts to my car I improved that and sold off the other one, this was all well and good but I knew that PB had made a third RC buggy, I’d seen advert for it in archive RC magazines and I really wanted to get my hands on one so that I would have the Hat-trick of PB cars, this car is the PB Ace

Now the Mini-Mustang was a very popular & successful competition car, The Maxima was an update of the Mustang design and was also successful to a lesser extent, however both these cars had advanced features namely a monocoque spine chassis with a Mid mounted motor, as such this layout was generally accepted as the way forward in competition off-road 4WD buggy design, so when PB bought out the ACE as the successor to the Maxima & Mini-Mustang it was seen as a step backwards as on this car they had moved the motor position to the rear of the car and adopted a fabricated chassis with upper & lower FRP decks and separate transmission blocks front & rear made from machined aluminium side frames to which all the other suspension components were bolted, the suspension was a mish-mash of styles, it had the Mini-mustang suspension on the front and the Maxima suspension on the rear, the car was priced at £200+ as a high end competition kit but most people saw the chassis design as obsolete and old hat, due to the rear mounted motor the car was heavy and had balance related handling issues and as the Schumacher CAT had now been perfected and won the 1987 world Championships everyone wanted one and the PB ACE flopped, less than a year after its release PB was forced to sell off their unsold kits at rock bottom prices, as a result PB never made another 1:10th scale Electric car instead they concentrated on making 1:8th scale petrol powered Boggy & Pan cars a market that they were still successful and made competitive products.

The PB ACE then is a very rare car, few were sold initially and as a result the production run was curtailed, those that were bought to race were soon broken or discarded in favour of something better all this has conspired to make sure that precious few of these cars survive today, Now when I was a serious collector I put out my feelers for one of these and set up my Ebay search engine to find me one, but for a long time there was nothing not even a nibble, then one day a used example came up on Ebay and I missed out on being outbid by a another TC member (VintageJack) so I was back to square one, at that time I knew of only two TC members who had these, Vintage Jack and Barrypops, now I’d been in dealings with Barry Chang before and I’d often told him what cars I was after while commending him on his extensive collection, then one day he made me an offer I could not refuse, He had acquired a MIB ACE but already had a used one in his collection that he was restoring, so he very kindly offered his project car to me for a premium price, at the time I had the available funds and knew how hard to find these cars were so I bit his hand off and snapped it up, when it arrived it turned out to be in excellent condition in fact you could say it was new built, it wasn’t 100% complete, the original front bumper was missing but an aftermarket one had been supplied, the lexan gear cover but pretty much everything else was there, it came with an original box, some assorted decals and a photo copied manual, the car was in pieces so I had to build it up, this was quite straight forward and before long I had the completed car, Then like so many other cars it was packed away in the loft and forgotten about.

Fast Forward to 2011 and I’m looking for cars to paint up, the PB ACE is one such car, now I have the copy manual that shows the car having a simple design so I tried to copy it, for the base colour I chose Red mainly as I had multiple tins of Red paint, the stripes I painted white using the usual technique I’d developed of drawing the colour dividing lines on the outside of the shell with special felt pen, using the manual photos as a guide I marked out the stripes, then I painted the cockpit windows in black, this car for some reason has a corrugated texture to the lexan on the windows, my guess as to the reason for this is that it makes the surface better for applying the B.R.C.A racing number stickers, I had acquired some for this car but they are not stuck to the windows, anyway once the stripes had been painted the car was ready for spraying but not before I’d masked it up, This car also has a lexan under tray and I could have left it clear but I decided to paint it also, however I masked off the central strip of the under tray as it allows you to view the belt drive transmission, so I sprayed the under tray first and after it had dried I fitted it to the car, so long so good.

I began spraying the body and wing and while I waited for the paint to dry between coats I went back to the car and decided to install a steering servo as I happened to have one to spare, fitting it was quite easy I had to make up a servo rod but fortunately I have a little spares box full of ball joints & servo rods or various lengths and I soon managed to find one suitable and get it fitted & working, then I happened to notice that their was a lot of play in the front upper wishbones were they attach to the central pivot blocks, this is soon rectified by inserting shimming washers each side that soon sorted that out, by this time the body was dry and ready for fitted, I ripped off the masking and applied the B.R.C.A number stickers, the car has one on each side and one of the rear wing in the middle, the wing one was fine but the side ones I had issues with, there is a rectangular recess on each side that is part of the body fixing via Velcro strips, this meant that the number roundels were lumpy and wrinkled when applied and pressed down, and I was not having much luck with the rest of the decals? The main problem I have is that I only had a few decals most were individuals (not pairs) and they came in three colours, Black, White & Red, but these decals turned out to be semi-transparent when applied they almost blended into the background colours, so I made the best of what I had and applied what I’d got, the end result was in my mind a little bland? And didn’t look quite as good as the photos of the car in the manual, so I took some pictures and left it at that…

The next day I had a brain wave what is the best and simplest way to improve the look of a car without adding any more decals… My answer, add trim stripes as I now had a set of white trim line stripes I decided to apply some to the ACE to accentuate its body lines, so I set about doing just that, but first I had to sort out the problem with the BRCA stickers on the sides, I peeled them back just enough and cut out a thin plasticard packing piece to sit in the recess and bring the surface up to the same level as the rest of the side, this sorta worked OK, then I Had to peel off some of the decals I’d applied the day before and reposition them, some I had to trim and apply a white backing to using wide trim stripes so that they would show through better and not blend into the background so much, then I applied the trim lines, now I will admit I probably got a bit carried away when I was doing this, not only did I apply parallel stripes to the existing stripe over the top but I lines out the sides of the car also with thinner stripes, then to finish off I put on a some small Tamiya style sponsor decals and the look is complete, now I dunno what you people will make of this I suspect you will comment to say that I’ve gone too far with the striping, but at least the car now has some paint on it and you can see what this shell is supposede to look like.