Jim85IROC

I'll see if I can get these today

I was able to get the grill and taillight assemblies painted and installed. Hoping to finish this up soon!

Because this is a lexan body, I had to do things a bit differently. The orange was painted on the inside, but the chrome needed to be on the outside to have the "chrome" look. I tried using it on the inside and it doesn't look right.

Progress has been hard to come by, but I've gotten the wheel wells cut, masked and painted the body. I painted the bumpers from the inside, but then on the outside I used the protective film as a paint mask and trimmed away the area over the bumpers and the areas around the windows that should have chrome trim, then painted it with a chrome pen. Once the remainder of the film was removed, it left nice sharp lines and fairly convincing chrome trim. Body looks good. Next I cut out the lexan to fit the printed taillight assembly. This is just a rough draft print but I'm really happy with how it looks. Once the final one is printed, smoothed and painted, I think it'll look great. One problem that I'm running into is that the chrome paint isn't holding up well at all. Just handling the body to cut the lexan and install the printed parts has dulled the hell out of it. Hopefully I can touch it up when I'm done.

Yeah, that's an issue with a lot of bodies on that chassis. That chassis would work great with the RJ Speed body because it's too wide for normal 190mm chassis.

Finally, some progress on the RJ-Speed General Lee build! I haven't been able to touch it in over 6 weeks, but between Christmas vacation and messing up my back last week, I've had a lot of time in my desk chair in front of Fusion 360. I modified the Kyosho General Lee front end to fit the RJ Speed body, and I also created a whole new rear taillight assembly from scratch. Right now these are still in draft form and are printed at a high layer height with no sanding/smoothing done. These are just to make sure things fit and that I'm happy with the overall design before I take the time to print & detail the final set. Even though these are drafts, I like to paint them just so I can get a sense of how they're going to look, plus they photograph & video much better than just having all black pieces. Here's the fully assembled rear taillight assembly: Here's the piece taken apart to show the individual sections. This was done so that I can paint & detail the pieces correctly, plus it gives me the ability to use a transparent taillight lense that I can put an LED behind if I get ambitious down the road: The front is essentially a re-scaled & re-angled copy of the one I designed for the Kyosho body: And the individual pieces, again so that I can paint & detail the assembly properly:

3d printing is great when you've got a need for specific parts and the ability to create them in 3D CAD. Of course, there's also plenty of opportunity to just print other people's designs, but obviously that only gets you so far because you are dependent on somebody else having designed what you need. If you can put in the time to learn a 3d cad program, then the sky is the limit in what you can do. I got into 3d printing primarily because I wanted to be able to make custom parts for a lot of my RC car projects, and it's been great for that. When I decided to take on some Dukes of Hazzard RC builds, it was the 3d printer that gave me the ability to do that. Between finding & printing otherwise unobtainable parts like the vector wheels and Rosco's car, to using Fusion 360 to design my own custom parts like the 69 charger front grill, the push bar, and now the 69 charger rear taillight panel & tail lights for my next RC General Lee build. It's also great for silly stuff around the house that breaks and doesn't have parts available. There's a locking cap that broke on one wheel of my daughter's American Girl Doll toy car that rendered the car unusable. 20 minutes in 3d cad and another hour on the printer and I had a replacement piece that fixed the car and restored unchecked emotions in our house.

Lately free time has been at a massive premium, especially since deer season started, so progress has been minimal. I haven't had time to work on the 3d printed police car at all, but I have made some minor progress on the RJ Speed General Lee, specifically the body mounts on the WL Toys chassis. Here's a shot of the chassis with all of the electronics reinstalled and the front & rear body mounts fabricated: Here's an up-close of the front & rear mounts, both of which were made the same way: The mounts are both made from 1/16" Kydex sheets. In the past I've always worked with 1/8" Kydex, which is extremely durable and rigid, but heavy. Because this car already weighs more than a real Dodge Charger because of the massive aluminum chassis, I really need to cut weight wherever I can or that 390 sized motor won't stand a chance of surviving for long. The problem with such thin material is that it's not very rigid, so I had to do more than just a right angle bend like I would have done with the thicker stuff. To make these stronger, I had to cut the "wings" on the sides and bend them over and tie them together with screws. Hopefully that's more clear in the underside pics: Here is the body set onto the chassis with the new mounts: One of the issues that I've run into is that the body doesn't sit as low as I had hoped, so I need to rethink my attachment ideas. Originally I was just going to go with the standard body post method, since that's the easiest, and it would make it more like the Kyosho "hero" car that this will be standing in for during jump scenes. I could bend the kydex down more and still fit the body posts, but the body sits right where it should as-is, so I think that instead of fooling with the body posts, I'm going to just go with velcro mounts and call it a day. From the beginning, the plan has been to add a lip to the bottom of the chassis to attach the bottom of the body to the chassis with velcro anyway, so what's a little more on the top? Here's a close up of the mounts through the body: The next step is to trim back the mounts, as I don't need them to extend as far from the shock towers. After that, I need to locate and cut out the wheel well openings, and then the 3d design & print work starts for the body. I'm trying to accomplish as much of the "in the garage" work as I can before it gets stupid cold, because I'd rather sit inside in front of the computer during that period. This means that I also need to make some real progress on the police body soon, or I'm going to have to spend a fortune on propane to heat the garage every time I go out there to work on it.

Got a new video up that compares these two Chargers, specifically the differences in the bodies:

Decided to sticker up the gray body. I love how this looks!

As for the Georgia decals, that's a bit tougher, but not too bad, especially at your smaller scale. It could be as easy as finding good images and printing them on decal sheets. They won't be waterproof nor UV resistant, but that may not matter for an inside model. If it does, you can take the design to someone that is doing custom decals or waterslides and they can print it for you. After I was satisfied with my Hazzard County Sheriff decals I sent the file to the same place that I bought my General decals from. As for designing them, I did my Sheriff decals in GIMP (it's an open source equivalent of Photoshop). This would be perfect for simple graphics and for cleaning up and arranging images that you find on the web, which will probably be high enough resolution to give good crisp results on a 1/25 scale. If you need to create some from scratch, a vector-based application would probably be easier, but I'm not familiar enough with those to give recommendations. Hoss's designs are very well done, so he would probably be able to give advice if you end up going that route.

I don't have pics, but when I did a 25th scale general lee model a zillion years ago in college, I used a piece of the sprue to make an antenna base and then heated and pulled a thin piece of another sprue to make the antenna itself. It looked nice. On my 1/10 scale General I designed and 3d printed a base that was designed to accept an unwound guitar string (a "g" string specifically). That probably wouldn't scale well to 25th scale, but you could make the base out of styrene or a piece of scrap sprue material and use an unwound "e" string for the antenna.

I recently picked up the brushless Kyosho Charger VE on the left. When I reprinted Rosco's police car, I sized it specifically to work on the Fazer chassis. I'll swap the General Lee stuff over to the brushless chassis and use the brushed one for the police car. I also grabbed a set of black & white General Lee decals for the gray body, because why not.

It's later in the year. The humidity is gone and I'll be painting inside. It should go a lot better.

Free time has been sparse lately, but I managed to get another police body printed. The next step is to do all of the sanding, filling, priming to the individual pieces and then glue it together and do more sanding, filling & priming.

This is just how unpainted lexan bodies come. It'll be painted once I finish all of the other modifications.

Car number 2 is on the bench. This is going to be my "stunt" car, so it needs to handle jumps. This uses the RJ Speed body, which is oddly proportioned, which works to my benefit here because I can butcher a buggy with more suspension travel instead of using another touring car chassis. What I ended up with is the WLToys 124017 V2. You can see that the track width is close The track width is almost perfect, but the 228mm wheelbase is a far cry from the 274mm wheelbase that I want. So, to get the wheelbase I want, a custom chassis is in order. I started by adding tape to the bare chassis in order to trace it out and mark all of the necessary holes. I added a couple parallel lines to help me align the halves when I transfer them to cardboard. I added wings because I want the chassis to extend all the way out to the body. I can attach the body to it, plus it will look better jumping with the bottom closed up. I may decide to narrow this and replace the wings with something lighter later. Here's the cardboard all cut out. Cardboard was transferred to 1/8" aluminum and cut out. Next, I clamped the original chassis to the aluminum and transferred all of the holes that I'm using, then countersunk them. Lastly, I bent the ends of the chassis to line up with the front and rear diff housings. With the front and rear axle assemblies bolted up, it's starting to look like an RC car again. And it's really starting to look like something with the body set into place Now that the chassis is done, I need to focus on the center driveshaft. I disassembled it and decided that making a new one would be difficult. Getting the flat spots accurate and concentric would be difficult. It would also require getting the length perfect or packing in a bunch of shims to get front and rear gear mesh correct. I think an easier solution is to cut the center shaft and sleeve it. I can add the sleeve with the two halves installed in order to maintain correct gear mesh, and as long as the sleeve fits properly, the driveshaft should atay true.

Hoss, thanks for the info. I did plan to move the front side markers but it turned out that there was a slight indentation in the lexan that would have been visible with the decals gone, so I opted to leave them where they were. I had originally planned to mention that in the video, but as it approached 40 minutes in length, I started going back and trimming more and more out of it, including that.

I just got the video for the Kyosho build posted. I hope y'all like it. https://youtu.be/L17vEDxZ6zU

The first of the General Lees that I'm building is done! After I get the rest to this point I want to do some additional work to them, but this is good until then.

Progress over the last couple days includes replacing the draft grill with the final one, followed by laying out the decal positions in preparation for application.

Got the rear of the car done today. I painted the rear black, and also painted the inside of the chrome trim red on the bottom and black on the other 3 sides to better match real 69 tail lights.

Been a little while since I posted an update. I bent up a kydex plate that attaches to the underside of the chassis and serves as a push bar mount. I designed the pushbar in Fusion 360 and printed it, with a couple revisions until I was happy with the fitment and appearance. Since a printed push bar won't be super strong, once I was happy with the part, I printed a template and transferred it to Kydex for the uprights. For the tubes I used some carbon fiber tubing, with a 3d printed insert to screw into. I ended up liking how the carbon fiber looked so much that I decided not to paint it. I'm real happy with how the front end came out. I also printed another grill in higher quality, sanded it smooth and painted it, but I haven't put it in yet.

I did find a review on youtube of the 2nd one I posted (which is older) that showed it in 4:3, so I think I'll play it safe and go with that set.

Does anybody have feedback on the various DVD sets for the series that are available? I see a set from 2020 that is in Wal Mart and Amazon that looks like this: [ And another that looks like this: Is anybody familiar with both sets and have any feedback about the difference? I've heard that one of them may be in 16:9 instead of 4:3. I'd prefer the original 4:3. I have the Season 1 DVD, but it won't play in my blue ray player, 9nly on my PC, so I want to get a new complete set, but I want to avoid the 16:9 ratio.