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Desert400

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I've done quite a few over the years. Those that turn out OK will pop up here as and when.

 

Here's my all-time favourite Le Mans car, Paul Newman's Porsche 935, placed third at Le Mans in 1979. The Racer Sideways 935/77 is closest but that particular car had very short 'running boards' down the side. Couldn't trim them because they're flush with the chassis so a little judicious black paint masks the bottom by 2-3mm

 

I repainted the cooling disks plain yellow. The 1:1 car did run with them plain yellow for at least one stint in the race but I'd prefer to get the proper red BBS pattern on them at some point She's looking a bit careworn after two seasons of Group 5 racing. No mods, stock tyres - just fast. I only intended to give it a little run on the big track but was so much faster than with my usual Capri she has been employed ever since.

 

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Most of my repaints are NASCARs. I have a small oval at home and we run an American Night regularly at the club where they get an airing. I'm going to try and sort my photo hosting out before putting more up...

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Some club racers. We have several one-make race classes where a lot of the same liveries crop up. I did this one back in 2011 soon after joining the club when there was a special offer on the Rizla Caterham 7. With four identical cars it was hard to tell them apart so I did mine up as the then-current Caterham F1 team with Jarno Trulli in the hot seat...

 

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Other classes become one-make classes because there's such a dominant car. Our Scalextric Muscle class is one such, where the Corvette L88 has so much over the Camaros and Mustangs thanks to that 62mm rear axle that there's no point showing up without one. There were three examples with this livery, so I stuck Jessica Simpson on the roof:

 

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Another car that's done a lot of competing. We had a standard Scalextric rally class for a while and the Fiesta was the car of choice. It's actually a very god performer on all surfaces with very little work needed. At the time there was only the one livery available, so I went for Valentino Rossi's matte example as a repaint. It competed in three Slot Rally GB events and a season of club racing, then got sold to a guy who rallies it across the UK and beyond.

 

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One more for now and another rally car. As with the above repaints, this was born of necessity. We have an SCX 4WD Rally class and there's only one real choice if you want some points: the Lancia Delta S4. Available in black or Totip, there are loads of both. Fortunately there's a guy in Spain who was wild about producing liveries. He drew up and printed the decals.

 

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Tha about covers it for now! Some other stuff will follow...

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Here's another mild makeover. Not for competition, I just wanted a nice Ferrari 330P and couldn't afford the Racer P4. I've never really got on with the Scalextric one - curves aren't right and the nose has been stretched for the round guide to fit. The Exin is much closer to the 1:1 car in my view, so I did this one as the Surtees/Parkes car from 1966 Nürburgring 1000km. Wheels taken from the SCX F40. A dab of paint and some numbers and Cavallinos - job done.

 

A year or so later I was doing a job with John Surtees so I dug it out and showed it to him. He very kindly signed it. It's a keeper.

 

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One more for luck - and it goes with the Ferrari anyway. I got inspired after reading the brilliant book Go Like Hell and wanted to build a pre-Shelby GT40. This was the result, being the Ford UK entry from Le Mans 1965. Brush painted in the correct Ford Linden Green from a little touch-up brush bottle, there are one or two brush marks but it actually went on very nicely. Decals from a Le Mans specialist in France. Wheels from Racer, requiring a switch to inline as the wheels don't fit when it's in sidewinder configuration.

 

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Edited by Desert400
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And so to the NASCARs. This is the one that got me into the fine art of going fast and turning left - Dale Earnhardt Jr's 2004 Winn Dixie 250 car from the second-tier Busch Series. One of the best races I've ever seen in any form that I stumbled across during a bout of insomnia. When you settle in and watch what goes on both the subtleties and the car control of these guys - particularly with these aero cars back then - was staggering. Throw in personality by the bucket-load and I was hooked. I also like that he changed his name on the door of this one to 'Stroker Ace' - after all, he did have the fastest chicken in the south.

 

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These are the most recent efforts. We'll start with a new Dale Jr car for the inline NASCAR class. The Pontiac Grand Prix that Scaley made and the contemporary Chevrolet Monte Carlo were effectively the same design, only the front bumper area and the rear three-quarter window were different. I made the nose about right with Milliput but left the window and simply used paint and a Sharpie to approximate the Chevy shape.

 

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And to contrast here's the original Pontiac body, this one done for my son in Terry Labonte's special livery promoting Jurassic Park III.

 

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Two more that I did for the boy-child are Batman and The Joker Ford Taurus's. The good thing about these is that the Bash'n'Crash set cars are regularly to be found for around £10-15 per pair. Although I wince a bit after a fair bit or work on the paint, he and his little sister can go hog wild with these without knocking any bits off.

 

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This is the other one I've done just for him, the 2003 Hulk Chevy as raced by Terry Labonte. It also helps that his favourite colour is green. Having belatedly seen a die cast I realise that the paint should grade to a mid-green on the trunk but he's not fussed so I'll try and get over myself.

 

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I'll dig out some older cars later.

Edited by Desert400
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Here's a little bit more Americana. I'd like to know if any of the white Dallaras haven't been painted up in Marlboro Penske colours. It must be a minority. The yellow Celica in the background is my work-in-progress Celica GT-Four for rallycross nights. We take out the hairpin from the club's Ninco track and the straights either side of it and replace them with the same pieces but made from Ninco Raid off-road track. The 'joker' is that everyone has to pick a race where they get double points, so they either win big or kick themselves in that heat.

 

Until we get our heads around making an actual rallycross track with a joker loop using digital it's pretty effective as an analogue solution.

 

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And from Rallycross back to rally and Ari Vatanen's celebrated 1982 British Rally Championship car 'Black Beauty'. This is widely credited as the fastest rally Escort built in period - probably wouldn't make the Top 10 these days but you never see Escorts move around the way they used to then.

 

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Another rally car and more Martini stripes. This is Italian driver Andrea Aghini's winning Integrale from the 1992 Sanremo, made with the SCX model. It looks prettier than it goes. I've never found a reason for it but despite near-perfect shape and setup this is one of the slowest 4WD SCX cars I've seen. It's not just mine, I've never seen a good one yet.

 

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And less of a repaint, more of a kit bash. This is the Slot Rally GB kit of the Škoda Felicia S2000 in factory colours for the 2010 Intercontinental Rally Challenge. Paint is the proper Škoda green with VW candy white. From 2011 the green paint was actually a Vauxhall colour because it showed up better on the TV.

 

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Some lovely repaints in there...

Well done

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Thanks, everyone.

 

I think I agree with you, Wobble. We used to have a 'Revell long chassis' class and the Fairlane was one of the better ones (the Mercedes 200 wasn't), but we all had massive handling problems.

 

I asked a mate in the States how they tolerated the things as they're really popular there and he gave me a few pointers on setup. It turned into a peach with just a little body rock and the guide lowered 1-2mm so I treated it to some of Patto's finest and the class was promptly dropped at the next AGM! Can't bring myself to part with it, though.

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I found a few more photos. This one I did for a Shell corporate event last year. I actually made the current New Generation i20 WRC from a beautiful resin kit and mixed up an approximation of the 'top secret' pinky-blue, got some decals... great. But then Shell said that they didn't want to use an unlicensed model of a Hyundai and run the risk of annoying the Koreans so I had to throw this thing together in three hours, including finding a hobby shop that sold slot cars and a craft show for the decal paper!

 

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This one's my club racer in out Sixties Le Mans class. Standard Slot.It GT40 white kit, great quality decals from Decaldoc. Unfortunately his red was completely out of register and looked like mud. As it's a racer and I want to be able to see the thing in a pack (and assuming that Maurizio is going to release this livery eventually), I amped up the red and went up half a notch on the blue whilst I was at it. It sort of looks right and more important for me I can see it on track.

 

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Slot.It Porsche 962 that I did for a Porsche modelling competition. It was intended for static models but when I showed them how many parts went into a white kit, it turned out to be more than any of the 1/24 static models. Livery is From Le Mans 1990. Slot.It Porsches have quite a few compromises when you look at them up close but I can certainly live with them.

 

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I've got a small collection of James Bond cars. Here is the Carrera Ford Thunderbird which I detailed a little bit. Originally it was the Goth Chick special edition, so I swapped out the wire wheels for a set of the Thunderbird steel wheels from an earlier release, painted up the same as those on the 1957 F-bird, which was basically a NASCAR engine in a boulevard cruiser. I took the goth 'tattoos' off the paintwork and removed the roof. Why? Ian Fleming drove a black T-bird on F-bird rims. I thought he'd approve of the shady lady in the driver's seat so left her in.

 

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A slightly less tenuous Bond link to this one: the Goldeneye Ferrari. Proslot produced the F355 GTS with no driver and a black interior. I painted up a Le Mans Miniatures figure as Xenia Onatopp, then detailed the interior to match the (non-standard) finish on the movie car as best I could. I do race it against my scratch built DB5 and it is as dynamically one-sided a contest as you'd expect.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

It doesn't really count as a repaint but I did a little cosmetic finishing job on my favourite Sierra (so far). The job list was:

  • Remove driver's window glass
  • Paint the window frames (many of the 1:1 Sierras ran with body colour 'B' pillars - not DJR)
  • Paint the interior tray and roll cage (most of the interior was the same red as the exterior)
  • Detailed the driver figure (Dick Johnson's helmet and overalls, black balaclava, sunglasses, black gloves)

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Of course now I'll have to go back over my other Sierras and do the same. Darn. So far I've got the Andy Rouse ICS version, Tim Harvey Labatt's, Robb Gravett's Trakstar car (built by DJR) and the Longhurst/Mezera car.

 

Actually, in doing this job I noticed that there are both left-hand-drive and right-hand-drive cars and that the interior tray allows for both with only a change of dashboard piece. Of course you can always rely on Scalextric to stuff something up and it seems that Robb Gravett is sitting on the wrong side of his RS500. I wouldn't mind so much but I bought two of them as it's much easier to strip and repaint an all-white car. and having already started work by doing the paint and cutting out the right side window I'm in a bit of a fix.

 

I have asked Scalextric to send two replacement RHD interiors. We'll see how that goes...

 

Can't help thinking that maybe the intention was to do the Moffat ANZ car and then there was a late change of plan. I think only the Eggenberger-built RS500s were LHD and there were far fewer of them than there were British or Aussie built cars. Ah, well... I shall go back to admiring 'little Dick' before I bite the bullet and detail a few more.

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  • 2 months later...

Another tiny touch-up job on the latest BTCC BMW M3 for the late, great Will Hoy. Looking at it in detail the fonts are off on the driver's name and Esso logos. Both should be Arial bold, no real cause for difficulty. Never mind I've waited long enough for this one, so did my best on Will's helmet design, appropriate overalls and roll cage colours.

 

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Here's a Teamslot Stratos that was thrown together out of a lot of other Teamslot bits from deceased rally cars and an incomplete white kit. Rally plates were spares from when I competed on Slot Rally GB and the livery is off the Paul Newman Porsche 935.

 

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Two Ferrari 312s - a T and a T3. We run standard Scalextric F1s with the Johnson motor. Neither of these are wildly competitive but at least they look prettier than they did.

 

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And finally, as a new retro class for this year we've got Scalextric 90s Legends, which is for the brown bar magnet GTs. A few years back a good mate of mine produced a load of the Ferrari F40s with the covers of gentlemen's magazines on them, so I thought I'd revive the practice. They're all as cheap as anything to buy - I think the most expensive was £8 at a swap meet - and make a decent class to race. The F40, Diablo and Porsche GT1 have made the running so far. The Jaguar needs some attention.

 

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The Jaguar livery was designed in a fit of patriotism before last year's Olympics.

 

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The GT1 was designed around the very louche hotel and nightclub Hotel Byblos in Cannes, a favourite haunt for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Brigitte Bardot and Peter Sellers. Lui is the French answer to Playboy and after all the dodgy Fly Playboy editions I thought we'd go for a European look... and Jennifer Lawrence, obviously. It was supposed to look like surf on sand but turned out a bit like the SCX 'snow' on rally cars. No matter, it's fast enough.

 

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Love the F1 repaints. We run a class for these so might get the paint brush out on my Ferrari.

Our group are also having fun with older brown bar Scaleys. Did the 3 series BMW as a build endurance race awhile back & now working up some Audi A4's for a similar event.

Surprising how well you can make them go..

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They are only toys .... until you pull the trigger.

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The SuperTourers have long been a favourite brown bar magnet class. On our track the Renault Laguna and Audi A4 are the main picks but my Vectra keeps them honest. The BMWs and Mondeos struggle a bit.

 

I ran the Porsche GT1 this week and it was a bit embarrassing. Having ground down the rear tyres a bit in the truing process the magnet was 'ticking' over every track join and I lapped everyone but myself in a 10-lapper. I'll go back to the F40 next week on stock tyres. It's meant to be a fun class, not a massacre.

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