Jim85IROC

Yeah. Typo on my phone

I'm not aware of any decal templates, but I'm very satisfied with the MCU Racing decals. They're from Canada and I have no idea how much it costs to ship to Europe, but I believe that MCI has plenty of vintage RC decal customers overseas.

For those who are interested, I posted the car chase from the police video separately. I did some additional editing, color grading and I added music. I'm pretty happy with the result. https://youtu.be/wjxQXFVqKgQ

Thanks Roger!

The video is up for Rosco's car and it includes a fun car chase at the beginning of the video!

Got Rosco painted and installed! He ended up looking more like Enos than Rosco, but I don't really have any control over that. Since this was the first time I ever painted a driver figure, I'm pretty happy with how he came out.

Well, Roscoe's car is done(ish)! I still need to paint and install Roscoe and I think I'm going to swap to the larger "sheriff" decals on the fenders and quarters, but otherwise, it's done! The windshield is thinner than I'd prefer, but it seems to look good. Hopefully it holds up. I don't love the large wheels and low profile tires, but the center caps help sell it. Down the road I may design wheels that use the VTA style tires. A nice pair!

For what it's worth, I'm most of the way through Season 2 and my results are mixed. I recalled Season 1 looking pretty good, but Season 2 has so much MPG compression that it's very distracting. Massive pixelation and very poor color depth. To be honest, most of the episodes that I've found on Youtube look much better than this DVD does, which makes me think that there's still got to be a higher quality set out there that everybody was ripping to put onto youtube.

I just realized that the last picture that's supposed to show the rear mounts was a repeat of the front mount. I can't go back and edit it anymore, but anyway, here's the picture of how the rear interior mount is done with the painted washer at the bottom of the body post:

I haven't made much progress on Rosco's car, but I did swap the cool white headlights for much better looking warm white lights. On the side I've also been working on an interior for the Kyosho General. I was lucky enough to find a really well made 3d model of a 69 Charger with a full interior. After some tweaks to the files, I was able to print the dash, door panels, seats and rear package tray. I printed the floor too, but quickly realized that I had to cut almost all of it away to fit over the chassis, so I wound up cutting the door panels and rear package tray so I could install a false floor that I made from a styrene sheet. After that I printed partial seats to work with the false floor. Overall I'm real happy with the interior, but after all of this I think when I get time I want to redo it with higher quality prints and a much lower floor for the front seat area. Here's the interior with the body off: I cut down a Traxxas body mount and installed it in the front chassis plate: At the rear I am sitting some tan painted washers right on top of the body post mounts. There are large holes in the package tray to fit over the body posts. The body itself holds the rear of the interior down. Next I need to cut out the windows on the orange car. I used the gray one as my guinea pig to practice on. I also want to design and print the roll bar for behind the front seats.

Lots of progress on Rosco's car. The magnetic body mounts are installed, although I think I need to tweak the body height a bit. The chrome trim is painted, the light bar is installed, the LED headlights and taillights are in, and the taillight lenses are installed. I still need to install the headlight lenses, but I'm waiting for now because I want to swap the cool white LEDs for more realistic looking warm white headlights. I've also been working on an interior for the car. It is a lexan interior intended for a crawler, but with a little work it fits decently. The driver and steering wheel are from Tamiya. In this pic the driver was sitting way too high, which tweaked the interior. I'm working on cutting him down to fit into the car, and hopefully leave enough room for a cowboy hat that I 3d printed. Coming up I need to paint the side marker lights, install the decals and then come up with a solution for the front & rear windshields. I almost had a heart attack right after I took these pictures. I grabbed the transmitter and must have squeezed the throttle. The car shot into the wall so hard that it dented the wall. I originally thought the car was unscathed, but I discovered a crack in the front fender above the wheel well. I glued that up and will need to reinforce that area to strengthen it.

Well, the car is white. I'm not thrilled with how it came out, but at least I didn't have all the issues that I had last time. The white coat started to lift the primer on the hood, but it was minor enough that I could sand it out prior to clear. The clear flowed well but still ended up looking dry once it set up. I'm going to do a minor wetsand and buff, but I'm not going to get crazy with it. It'll be fine for how I'm going to use it. Next is to add the chrome details, get the headlights, taillights, mirrors and decals on.

Got back to work on Rosco's car. Used putty to smooth things out, then primed, more putty, more primer. Glued the front and rear fascias on, putty, primer, putty, primer... Glued the front & rear halves together then you guessed it: putty, primer, putty primer. I also mounted the mockup light bar. Next I worked on moving body posts around to get the body to sit how I want on the chassis. Next I need to work up the courage to paint the body. After how that went last time, it's definitely not something that I'm looking forward to.

yeah, the suspensions on these are adjustable to an extent. Unlike a real charger that has torsion springs up front, this uses a more basic coil-over shock design. I replaced the springs with stiffer units and replaced the shock oil with a thicker oil. This is mostly to offset the extra weight of the upgrades, and it's not perfect, but once I get some more jumps in I can see how it looks. I think a thicker fluid would help more, but no matter what I do the suspension is going to bottom, so it's probably not going to gain me much.

For those who just want to see it running, I uploaded a video for that: As you can see from the jump at the end, it didn't fly very far and landed nose-down. I had the esc plugged into the wrong port on the receiver, so I was at half speed. As for the nose down landing, I'd hoped that sliding the battery back would fix it, but it didn't, so I had to resort to more drastic measures. I reinforced the rear panel behind the axle so it could hold the battery. That did the trick and now it lands flat, so I should be able to adjust how it lands with different size batteries. In other news, I got back to work on Rosco's car today and currently have it in primer. Hopefully this week I'll be able to glue it together and get it painted soon after. Lastly, I decided to take some pics of the Kyosho with some scale road barriers that I printed.

it's all about the right tool for the job.

The video for the latest build is up!

Yeah, the Kyosho has about 3-5mm per side at the wheel well openings, obviously less as you go further into the wheel well. With the 0mm offset wheels on the Traxxas maybe you'll be able to fit the body.

Total track width on the Kyosho measures about 205-206mm front and rear with the 6mm offset wheels. Total width on the one with the RJ Speed body is 205mm front with 0mm offset wheels and about 215mm rear with 6mm offset wheels.

I'll check next time I go out to the garage, but I think the Kyosho and TBG bodies are just about the same width.

Yeah, those are too wide for most normal onroad bodies. The RJ Speed body I just did should work with the right combo of 4-tec parts. Some of them had 274mm wheelbases, and some used a wider 200-210ish track width. If you can get a long chassis and swap the wide arms & axles it should be about right for the RJ body.

What car is it? That sounds like a pan car width.

The Kyoshos are a standard 190mm onroad width. I use wheels with a 6mm offset so my track width is a bit wider than normal.

Wheelbase is 274mm. Wheel well openings are about 80mm and the distance between wheel wells is about 190mm

The RJ Speed General is done. It definitely doesn't look as good as the Kyosho, but considering how boxy and flat this body was, I'm pretty happy with the result. This should make a great jump car. I built chassis wings from Kydex that the bidy velcros to in order to help pull it in and give it a more rounded profile. You can also see the push bar mount and a rear filler panel. I also painted the inside of the body black to make the underside look better when it jumps.