Hot Wheels' Hot Hues

[Brabham Repco F1]

I was going through some photos and came across these that I took of my old Hot Wheels some years ago. I think the blog is becoming overloaded with black-and-white images since I've started posting the E. L. Moore photos, because the Hot Wheels colours jumped out and shook my eyes around. So, in the spirit of sprucing up the place, strap into these wild rides.....

This Light-My-Firebird was one of my favourites and I’m glad that it’s still in fairly good condition. I think Snake on The Simpsons drives one of these things :-)

Custom T-Bird. This one originally belonged to my sister, but became mine when she got tired of Hot Wheels. It was downhill for the T-bird from then on. Broken off hood. Bent windshield support. Weird silver paint job. Ratty decals. Scrapes and scratches.

Custom T-Bird's Engine. Ok, the black wash doesn't look too bad.

Custom Volkswagen at the beach. Somehow, somewhere this one lost its engine.

Maserati Mistral that's seen better days. This was one of my favourites and it's too bad all that's left is the body and interior. I think the original was green and the blue is a repaint. And it was repainted with a brush!

Ok, this isn't a Hot Wheels vehicle, but a Johnny Lightning Custom '32 Ford. It's missing the windshield, but it's otherwise intact. I recall it was fast. If there was one vehicle that I could enlarge to full-size and drive around in, it would be this one - but after the flower power decals were removed and the windshield was replaced :-)

For some unknown reason I have a bit stuck in my head so that every time I see this car I think 'McLaren' when it's actually a Ford MK IV. I need to figure out why that is. Anyway, this one was green, but I brush painted it a gloppy white.

A Johnny Lightning Sunbeam that isn't that old and I think dates from 1998 or thereabouts. An excellent little toy and a favourite.

Classic '32 Ford Vicky. Another one that was originally my sister's. There are lots of those 'flower power' flower decals that we stuck on for 'customization' purposes. If they were removed, this one would be in fairly good condition - other than the bent axles from lots of racing!

Matchbox Jaguar Mk 10. This Jag is in pretty bad shape. No interior. No glass. No hood. And for some reason I applied the let's-put-this-thing-in-a-vise customization technique - the results speak for themselves. At one time I used this car to make tire tracks in wet plaster as a road building technique on an old model railroad. That's why the tires have white on them. But, I'm glad it's a survivor.

Ah, the Mighty Maverick. This was another of my favourites and luckily it too is intact. That giant rear wing was the highlight for me. Well, just about any car with an airplane sized wing bolted to the trunk caught my attention. The proto-aerodynamicist in me I guess. I considered the Richard Petty SuperBird the ultimate in automotive big-wing technology. I don't know if there was a Hot Wheel of that thing, but I did at one time have a model kit, but, alas, it's lost to time :-(

Well, that's all. I gotta go and get a new windshield.

Takin' out the trash siku style

A year or so ago I was mentioning to John that I needed a garbage truck for the streets of the Lost Ocean Line. A few weeks later he gave me one of these HO scale garbage trucks from siku. I ground off the roof-top hinges, glued the backend to the body, and did a little repainting. It needs some lettering, some weathering and it'll be cruising the streets every Monday.

A replacement for the lost E.L.Moore truck

Awhile back I did a kitbash of a VW microbus in order to build a truck similar to the one frequently seen in E. L. Moore building construction articles in the '70s. And later that same year I lost it while taking some photos outside. I've been getting ready to build a replacement, but last weekend I stumbled across this one at George's. It's a VW T2 Pick-up from Brekina Automodelle in Germany, and it's a great little model. It needs a little weathering here-and-there, but it's just the replacement I've been looking for.

Rail cars

I was browsing through some old issues of Model Railroader and came across this one from February 1982 that kicked off John Olson’s series on building the Jerome & Southwestern.

The cover scene got my attention. I particularly liked that 1940s (1930s maybe? - I can’t say for sure) vintage car on rails. I don’t know if those sorts of things actually existed, but it got me thinking about building more modern versions. An El Camino seemed to me ideal for this sort of conversion – and it turned out to be dead easy.

El Caminos get no respect. The popular media certainly depicts them as down-market transportation. Unfairly so I think.

There were a couple of weeks last summer where I would see one particular 1970s El Camino almost every day on the highway during my commute to work. It clearly had been restored to factory-stock condition. I was surprised at how small it seemed compared to the modern pickups and SUVs - it almost seemed like an economy car. No doubt with today’s engineering, a re-imagined version probably could be one. But, is there a market for them? I have no idea.

I started with a Model Power 1968 El Camino and an unpainted N-scale Atlas hopper car I found in the re-sale bin at the local hobby shop for $4.95 – this turned out the be the cheapest way to get some N-scale wheels for replacing the El Camino’s wheels and tires. Simply pull the axles and wheels from both items, cut the N-scale wheel-sets in half, insert them into the wheel wells in the E Camino, adjust the spacing so the car sits properly on the track, apply glue to hold the wheels in place, let dry, and, bingo, you’re done. The N-scale wheel sets are all plastic. This makes cutting and gluing them easy.

I have a number of 1/24 scale El Caminos, and its Fordian cousin the Ranchero, in my kit stash. And I’ve actually built a couple 

The first one was the El Camino Estrella kit-bash that I submitted it to StarShip Modeller’s Gallery when it was done. It was posted, and to my surprise I received a number of complementary emails about it - it was the first and last time that happened  It seemed to have struck a chord.

The second build wasn’t an El Camino, but its little Dodge Boys’ cousin, the 1980s Dodge Rampage. This was an extensive kit-bashing project that really pushed my skills. It’s certainly not perfect, but I rather liked the results.

I did the same road-to-rails conversion on a New Beetle that had fallen on hard times. One day I was vacuuming dust from the layout with my Shop-Vac and got a little too focused on picking up dirt and accidentally sucked back this bug from its parking spot. I was only able to find the body and chassis unit in the dust bag. The front seats and a tail-light were nowhere to be found. Given that it was just a pile of parts on my workbench, I figured it was a good candidate for conversion.

I used the same process that was applied to the El Camino. The only difference being that I glued the New Beetle’s wheel covers to the N-scale wheel-sets, and cast the missing tail-light with some Micro-Kristal-Clear.

I guess the problem with these rails cars is just that, they can only be used on the rails. I have an idea for a truck conversion for transporting these things over the roads that hopefully I can start to work on soon.

E.L. Moore's VW truck

E.L. Moore used a VW-based flatbed, pickup truck model as a photo prop in three of his construction articles - there may be more, my survey was certainly unscientific - from the 1970s. The composite picture below shows it (from left to right) at Bunn's Feed & Seed in the August '73 issue of Model Railroader, Jones' Chemical Co. in the March '74 issue of Model Railroader, and the RMC Paper Company in the April '74 issue of Model Railroad Craftsman (I built the paper company way back then using some unusual methods, hopefully I'll have a post on it in the future). It turns out that in the Bunn's article Mr. Moore used the VW as a prop, in different poses, in three separate photos.

Since I'm building an E.L. Moore industrial park to showcase the Bunn's Feed & Seed Plant and Jones' Chemical Co., I thought it right to include one of those VW flatbeds. I guess if I searched the internet enough I probably could have found one ready-made; however, I had two Model Power VW buses on hand that I bought awhile back at a local hobby shop, so I thought I'd try to convert one. Turns out it was relatively easy and fun.

The bus comes apart easily: it's only held together by pieces that snap together, so careful prying on the chassis will get the model to fall apart.

I used a Dremel with a cutting wheel, a small hacksaw, and some files to cut off the back of the bus and square it up to the final shape. Before cutting I drew some lines on the bus with a fine, black Sharpie pen so there were some guidelines to cut along.

A new back wall for the cab was cut from 0.020 inch styrene sheet and glued to the metal cab with thick superglue. A file was used to do some final shaping on the back wall once the glue was set in order to blend the metal cab and plastic wall. The joint line between the back wall and the cab was then filled and sanded to achieve the final shape.

And no, there is no rear window on the cab even though it looks like Mr. Moore's had one. No doubt his was a commercial product, and more-or-less modeled a real prototype that included a rear window to make it street legal. To be honest, I didn't think I had the skill to cut a clean, square window, so I deliberately left it off. However, I forgot to remove the rearview mirror from the cab, so maybe the driver has x-ray vision :)

The wood flatbed was made from a piece of 1/8 inch balsa and scored to make it look like it's composed of individual boards. It too was glued in place with some thick superglue.

These Model Power HO scale vehicles have a molding on the chassis to screw the item securely to its packaging. Often these extend into the field-of-view when the model is on display on the railroad - they look unsightly and grossly unrealistic. I used the Dremel to grind it off the bus chassis. I didn't fix up the chassis afterward, since it's never seen when the vehicle is on display.

I lost the headlights during the disassembly procedure. To recover, I filled the headlight holes with white glue since it dries near clear. The resulting new headlights aren't perfect, but they're not bad.

The body was painted with Model Master Acryl Dark Green that I had leftover from the Dodge AT-AT project I finished a couple of months back. I don't know what colour Mr. Moore's was, but dark green seemed right. The flatbed is painted with a loose wash of thinned flat black and brown paint. The cab interior was painted a tan colour, and the steering wheel was painted black and silver. To finish off, the entire vehicle was painted with a loose wash of thinned flat black to tone things down and add a little definition.

The Ontario license plates are items from Penitentiary Productions that I bought last year at George's Trains. If you follow their instructions on the package, they go on quite well and look good.

Now, I just need to locate some of the figures Mr. Moore used in the photos to complete the scene. That'll be tough.