Hello boys and girls!
Time to study the human body... No, I´m sure you can do this on your own. - No?
Well, OK then let´s concentrate on MiniZ bodies instead. Finally I managed to spend some time on my Kyosho Aston Martin DB9 and my TRP Mosler MT-900. Both of them are white body sets that you have to paint yourself. This means that you can create a unique and individualized body on the one hand but on the other you have to invest a lot of time and might screw it up. This appears to be very easy. Actually my plan was to create a very nice design as I used to do with my 1/10 touring car bodies but then I realized how tiny these body shells are. Because I didn´t want to look like an idiot on the track racing a fucked up car, I decided to paint them in white. Very mundane but good looking. A classic, I´d say. You might aks yourself, why I´m wasting my time on a paint job if I want to have my cars white anyway. The answer is simple.First, the white plastic doesn´t have a nice surface. It´s not very shiny (I´m sure Michael´d be okay with it ;) ). And second, it´s not a pure white. In short: An unpainted body doesn´t look as good as a painted one. Furthermore I was missing the good old smell of Tamiya colors...
Both bodies feature the same wheel base of 98mm which makes them perfect for the MR-03W- MM. The sets contain lot of additional parts you can apply to the body shells in order to let them look like the originals. Depending on the parts, you should mount them before spraying on the first lacquer coat. Nevertheless, in this case we are talking about racing bodies. Thus I didn´t attach the small parts in order to save some weight. Furthermore I´d loose them anyway while racing.
Unfortunately the original Mosler wing is quite small. I replaced it by an Atomic wing which should provide a lot more down force.
Preparation
Degrease your body before starting to paint! Just wash it in a bowl of lukewarm water and dish liquid. To get better results you can put the spray cans in warm water as well.
In order to alleviate the whole procedure of painting you can stick your body to an empty glass bottle wiht some double-faced tape. While spraying on the paint you easily can rotate and move the whole body.
Procedure
Be sure that the body is clean before start spraying. You have to be quite careful with the amount of paint. If you produced a varnish run react quickly! Use the corner of tissue and carefully let it touch the tear. Do not try to wipe it! The tissue will suck up the excess paint.
Wait about 30minutes before applying the next lacquer coat. In order to reduce this time you can place the bottle/body in front of a heater. I wouldn´t use a hair dryer to speed things up. It´ll blow dust on your body creating a bad surface.
After applying the last lacquer coat, the body has to dry properly. Depending in the room temperature it can take about 12hours. If you do not have so much time, be careful working on the body. The paint job is very damageable now.
Let´s assemble the windows. This is quite easy going:
1. Insert the windows and solder the pins. Use a soldering gun and adjust the temperature to 200°C.
2. Put on some masking tape on the inside (and maybe the outside) of the windows. This step only takes 2 minutes but helps avoiding a catastrophe! The drying superglue produces some sort of damp that will settle on your windows making them white.
3. Fill up larger holes with Pattex Extreme Repair.
4. Border the windows with superglue. Repeat this step one or two times.
5. Use Pattex Extreme Repair to glue on the body clips. Don´t mix up the left and the right side.
That´s it. Here we have two beautiful bodies waiting to be raced…
If you want to see your company logo on the Guinness World Record Race and further races ahead, just send some stickers and some of your products.
Flo
