Car Reconstruction Project

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Session One
	First off, some pictures of the cars as they came out of the box. Pretty awful. It was a hard pill to swallow, laying down cash for resin in such crappy condition. Not only are the cars full of bubbles and pits, but the resin is uncured in some places. To make matters worse, the grey car has it's wings snapped off, and the undercarriage has taken some serious damage. For the most part, the yellow car is in good condition, but is of similar low quality. Also pictured here is a reference photo of the original car. I obtained this picture from http://www.propworld.nu/ in their "Items sold" section. Notice how the underside is integrated directly into the body, and that there is no lip as seen in the kit I purchased. I plan on fixing this in my final rendering. Also of interest is the mounting hole in the original. If you look closely at the picture of the painted piece, you'll see on the underside, around the middle, there's a big frickin' hole. The propworld website indicates that this was for a motion-control camera mounting rig. That's all fine and dandy, but it's interesting to note that on the car I have, that hole is covered. The piece that's covering it can also be found on the grey car. I am not sure if the piece I have has a different lineage than the piece shown in the photos, or if it was modified prior to molding. Last time I checked, the piece pictured here is owned by a private collector I know, and he had yet to mold his piece. This makes me wonder if the castings I got ahold of were from a source closer to the studio??? I'll probably never know, but it's interesting to me.
	Here's the grey car. Notice the condition of the undercarriage. Oy! Well, this is where it all started. I had two cars, each of which were pretty beaten. I sat down and thought it through, and decided that I would do the cars simultaneously. This may diverge at some point, as I'm sure I will learn techniques from one that I may want to go back and apply to the other, but for the most part, I want to do them at the same time. I have also decided to completely rebuild the undercarriages and engines. They are just too trashed to recover. Out of the two cars, there are maybe two or three little parts that I could salvage. Frankly, I'd rather just rebuild them. This may diverge from what many collectors and builders would consider "legit". I will actually be throwing out legitimate studio work for the sake of my own. My philosophy is that I want something that's going to look really cool on my shelf. I am not hell-bent on having something as close to the studio original as possible, I want something that looks as "cool" as possible. To that end, I put together a web page of close up photos of the "Greeblies" that are found throughout the undercarriage and engine. Many of the parts are pieces from other model kits that may be currently available. Some of the parts are stock styrene from companies like Plastruct and Evergreen. Here's a link to the page if you want to check it out. If you can identify any of the parts, please let me know. I sent out an e-mail to a number of fellow collectors containing the link above, and asked for help. So far, a couple of folks have been very helpful in identifying pieces. One of my friends seems to have a bunch of the pieces on hand, and is going to send them to me. Most obvious of all the pieces are the two transmission halves seen on the underside of the grey car. Pretty cool. It is currently speculated that it is a 1/24th scale car, though nobody has identified exactly which car.