Jim85IROC

Today I cut down the 70 front grill to make a bumper. I need to decide whether to keep it like it is or to try to extend it back over the fender. Doing that will leave a bit of a visible seam in the chrome, so I'm not sure if it's worth doing vs just leaving it this shape and cleaning it up a bit.

Since I no longer have a printed body to work on until I can print another one, I've shifted my focus to one of the Generals. I'm starting with the Kyosho. For this car, the biggest task is to convert the front end from a 70 to a 69. I am doing this by removing the 70 chrome piece, cutting out the lexan behind the original grill, and installing a 3D printed grill that I'm designing. Here's the original 70 front end: Here's the front end with my conversion in place. Aside from tweaking the grill angle slightly, I think my design is essentially done. When I print the final one, I'll use a much lower layer height, but even with the draft quality, I'm super stoked with how it looks. Next step is to figure out a bumper. I'm hoping to cut down the 70 grill and see how it looks. Even though it won't extend back toward the wheel well, I think overall it'll look better than a printed bumper.

Thanks! The 1:10 scale cars really are a LOT bigger than the 1/18 scale stuff that most model & diecast collectors are used to. The best part about the RCs though, is that you get to see them in motion. In the RC world, a "shelf queen" is a pretty common term for a car that you build more as a functional model as opposed to one that you plan to use and abuse. It's real common in the vintage RC scene where a lot of guys will lovingly restore some of the more desirable models from the early to mid 80s, and as you can imagine with something like that, although it is restored to be fully functional, it won't ever get used because they want it to stay pristine. For me, it's a little different in that my goal is to mimic the show in the sense that I want to have the "hero" car that will get used for some of the close-ups and the general driving footage, and the "stunt" car for, well, the stunts. These lexan bodies are pretty durable overall, but they still take a beating. The 3d-printed bodies (Rosco's car) are even more fragile, and I don't think they'll tolerate jumping at all, at least not without some significant help. Thanks! I'm looking forward to the actual running videos that I hope to eventually make after I finish these cars. I really enjoy making the running videos, even though they don't perform well on my channel at all. I'm hoping that the Dukes videos do a lot better than my normal running videos. What few well-done dukes RC videos there are seem to have quite a following. This one here is probably one of the most well done, and is one that I've watched a bunch of times. If I can capture some of the realism from his videos, but add to it by including chase scenes with Rosco's car, I'll be a happy camper:

I had more issues with paint and decided to start over on the police car. In brighter news, I got my first video in the series up last night. This one is a comparison of the 4 available body options for General Lee builds: https://youtu.be/3h4aj6EsYQI

Yay. Back to the sandpaper I go.

Painted Roscoe's car today and it came out like ass. The paint seemed to go on very dry, even with heavy coats. It left a very rough surface, so now I'm going to need to wetsand before I apply the clear.

She's all primered up! Hopefully this weekend I'll have the white paint on.

Sorry for the goofy formatting, but I don't see an option for changing it. Anyway... Yesterday I glued the 3 main sections of the body together and hit it with primer to expose all of the defects. It's funny how good the body looked in white right from the printer, but as soon as you make it darker all of the flaws become very apparent. After numerous rounds of sanding, putty, sanding, priming, sanding, putty, etc, it's starting to come together. Next I need to get to work on the front and rear fascias.

The clear body all the way to the left has the styling of a 69 on the nose, but the hood looks more like a 70. But, that styling on the nose is so flat, that it's pretty bad either way, which is why I want to replace it with the 3d printed part.

This week I made a lot of progress. I revised the police decals and printed them on the actual decal sheets instead of regular paper. I also have a donor chassis that's been lengthened to fit the car. I designed and printed some hubcaps for the wheels. This is a pic of an early revision (my final revision was v14). My final Charger body arrived this week, as did my decals. All 4 have their pros and cons, and I plan to build all of them. The biggest issue with most of these bodies is that they're either not a proper 69 front end, or the body lacks detail, so I've started developing a new 3d printed grill assembly. These pics show one of my early versions in place on a couple of the bodies. I'm still working on revising these. I also built a chassis for the hard body car, but now I need to lengthen it to fit the wheelbase.

HossC, Thanks for the detective work! I'll have to decide just how true I want to stay to the Season 1 design, or if I'm better off going with the more familiar look from the later episodes. I suspect that I'll want to stay more in line with the later look just because it's more familiar to most people, but having those screen shots really helps me make sure that my sizing and positioning is spot on. Based on those screen grabs, it looks like my badge on the door should move back a bit, as well as move up. I think I also need to make the badge a little bit bigger too.

I've made a lot of progress on Roscoe's car. I've got the whole body printed, and temporarily taped together. I made some decals and printed them on photo paper just so I could tape them to the body to check fitment & location. What do you guys think about the decal size & placement? Any adjustments that I should make?

I started a proper thread in the hobby area per HossC's recommendation. Here's that thread:

The rear of the car finished printing. Now I just need to print the rear valance, then headlight & taillight lenses and the rearview mirrors. I sized this car to fit on the Fazer chassis, but neglected to take the width into account. The body is too narrow to contain the wheels, so I ended up ordering a 3Racing M4 chassis that's narrow enough to accommodate the body. I'll need to build a longer chassis. Aside from the wheel width, it looks pretty good!

Next, I started working on the Charger. I painted the silver on to the Vector wheels that I printed, and I pulled the 70 grill off the body. Once I print a 69 grill and cut the body back to accept it, I think it's going to start to look really good. The patrol car is still printing, but the front half is off the printer and I'm really happy with how it's looking.

Hi all. These first couple posts are repeats from my "new Member" thread, but this is where I'll keep posting my updates. I found this forum recently when so many of my google image searches kept bringing me here, usually to one of Hoss's great posts. All of the image searches are because I'm in the planning and early building stages of creating a Dukes rc car chase for my Youtube channel (it's an RC car channel). I just picked up a Kyosho Phazer with a 70 Charger body, so I have a little work to do to convert it to a 69 General. One way that I'm trying to separate my video(s) from those that are already out there is that I really want to make the rest of my props as correct as possible, within reason. This starts with an accurate Sherrif's car. There's virtually nothing out there in 1:10 scale for RC police cars at all, and certainly nothing that's period correct. I started looking for 3d printable options, and although nobody has the 77 Monaco/Fury models that we're most familiar with, I did manage to find a 74 Monaco, which is one of the models used in season one. This print is taking multiple days to print, and will take me even longer to sand, paint, and detail, but it should make for an awesome chase car! In addition to the cars, I want to make a cardboard building or two, and of course, I need to come up with a ramp and something to jump over. Going through this great site is really helping me to come up with some ideas, and hopefully soon I'll have a basic story board put together so I can start figuring out what props I'll need. The cool thing about the props is that they're items that my kids can help me make, so it gets them involved in my hobby. Anyway, if folks are interested, I'll post updates on my progress.

The rear of the car finished printing. Now I just need to print the rear valance, then headlight & taillight lenses and the rearview mirrors. I sized this car to fit on the Fazer chassis, but neglected to take the width into account. The body is too narrow to contain the wheels, so I ended up ordering a 3Racing M4 chassis that's narrow enough to accommodate the body. I'll need to build a longer chassis. Aside from the wheel width, it looks pretty good! Question for the moderators: since this isn't really an intro thread anymore, should I make a new thread in the appropriate forum, or should this thread be moved?

Today I started working on the Charger. I painted the silver on to the Vector wheels that I printed, and I pulled the 70 grill off the body. Once I print a 69 grill and cut the body back to accept it, I think it's going to start to look really good. The patrol car is still printing, but the front half is off the printer and I'm really happy with how it's looking.

HossC, Thanks for the clarification. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between the 74 and 75, but so far the only difference I've found is that the 75 seems to have turn signals or running lights in the lower front bumper opening and the 74 is all grill. Hopefully nobody will notice.

Hi all. I found this forum recently when so many of my google image searches kept bringing me here, usually to one of Hoss's great posts. All of the image searches are because I'm in the planning and early building stages of creating a Dukes rc car chase for my Youtube channel (it's an RC car channel). I just picked up a Kyosho Phazer with a 70 Charger body, so I have a little work to do to convert it to a 69 General. One way that I'm trying to separate my video(s) from those that are already out there is that I really want to make the rest of my props as correct as possible, within reason. This starts with an accurate Sherrif's car. There's virtually nothing out there in 1:10 scale for RC police cars at all, and certainly nothing that's period correct. I started looking for 3d printable options, and although nobody has the 77 Monaco/Fury models that we're most familiar with, I did manage to find a 74 Monaco, which is one of the models used in season one. This print is taking multiple days to print, and will take me even longer to sand, paint, and detail, but it should make for an awesome chase car! In addition to the cars, I want to make a cardboard building or two, and of course, I need to come up with a ramp and something to jump over. Going through this great site is really helping me to come up with some ideas, and hopefully soon I'll have a basic story board put together so I can start figuring out what props I'll need. The cool thing about the props is that they're items that my kids can help me make, so it gets them involved in my hobby. Anyway, if folks are interested, I'll post updates on my progress.