Sunday, May 6, 2012

DAD'S CAR

This post is a little off topic. A change once in a while is also good. My dad called me last week and  asked me if I could paint a toy car for him. My dad owns a Sunbeam Tiger and had bought a toy replica of it for his show case. The only problem was, it did not look like the one he had in his garage.  So I excepted the challenge. I thought at first this was going to be an easy project. Why not? Painting miniatures is easy enough, why not this. WELL let me tell you. This was a pain in the ass. I will explain as I show the pictures in the rest of the blog. First I will start with the pictures that me dad sent of his car.







I think this is a cool car!!! So next is the toy Sunbeam car.  This is the toy....




OK now comes the fun part. I had some things I needed to add to it. As you can see there is a lot missing. The first thing that I had to do was switch the steering wheel from the right side to the left side. That was easy. Next I had t make the roll bars. For the roll bars I used a green paper clip that was just the right thickness. I has to cut and glue it. After the roll bars I made the gear shifter. For this I used one of my wife's needles with  a plastic ball at the end of it. I melted the plastic ball with a lighter. This way I could get the size I wanted. After the gear shifter I had to make tail pipes. For this I had to drill two holes at the back of the car. I then stuck to sized toothpicks in the holes. After the pipes I had to make the side view mirrors. I hand carved these out of wood and glued them to the car. This is what the car looked like after the modifications. Oh yes I almost forgot. I added the hood scope as well. That was the first thing I did.









So next It was time to paint it. The easy part right? Noooooooooooo!!!! It all started from the priming. I guess the primer and the original paint on the toy car didn't work well together because as soon as I stop the priming the paint started to bubble. This caused me problems the rest of the way. After tyring to fix what I could with the paint by sanding and filling I started to paint the car. Of course with my luck the paint did not want to spread even on the car because of the primer. I did the best I could. I still got good results considering the facts. This is what it looks like now that it is finished.








I hope you like you car dad.