Wow, time flies!

So this is kind of cool -- over a year and a half later, someone posted a comment on the beginning post of this blog! Unfortunately, they'll find that my posts ended around March 2007, but there's a good reason.

On St. Patty's Day that year, we were rear-ended by a guy, totaling my poor previously mentioned Honda CR-V. Amazingly enough, my wife and I walked away from that with only bumps and bruises. While getting checked out by our doctor, we found out that my wife was pregnant! So that was the silver lining of that cloud. The downside was that her morning sickness was pretty much continuously present round the clock up through the beginning of the third trimester, which meant little time to spare on things like drifting.

And here I am now, and I really have no new updates on the drifter, mainly because I haven't had a chance to take any pics of it. I've added to lights to it, using some Yokomo light buckets for added detail, and then I used some white drinking straws with the red LEDs to make underbody light bars. Fortunately, the headlight and taillight stickers came off fairly easily. I then used one of my wife's cuticle/burnishing sticks to clean up the black paint I used to fill in the gaps around the sticker. The nice thing about these sticks is that they're hard enough to remove the paint but soft enough that they won't scratch up the Lexan.

The light buckets look just like the light assemblies you'd see in a full-sized car, and the LEDs plug right in. Then the light buckets attach to the car using double-sided tape. They included some metallic foil tape to further secure the light buckets.

The underbody light bars were simply made from drinking straws cut to length with one LED stuck in each end. Luckily the straws were perfectly sized to take the 5mm LEDs. Using a small strand of wire and blue painter's tape, I secured the LEDs in place and taped it to the inside of the body. I also used some painters tape to line the body where the bars would go so the light wouldn't bleed through the body itself.

I'm amazed at just how bright these little lights are. Some day I'll have pics posted. Some day.

Neighborhood Drift and New Hop-Ups!

Well, it's been over a week now since I finished painting the body and took the car out for its maiden voyage. Initially, I thought that the tires had too much grip, but now that I've run a few battery packs through, I've decided that they're actually pretty nice. I can get it going sideways pretty easily from a standstill or if I slow down before turning, but I can't get it to drift if I'm doing a high speed pass. I think the latter may be more of a function of having a virtually locked diff up front rather than a one-way unit.

Why a one-way? The virtually locked up diff causes both front wheels to be driven together, which is good for quick launches. However, they are also driven together in reverse, which isn't so good for braking, because it essentially locks up all four wheels causing the car to simply skid on all four wheels. A one-way unit up front still drives the wheels going forward for quick launches, but it free-wheels in brake/reverse. This means that when you brake, the front wheels continue to turn in the direction of forward travel while the rear wheels brake, giving you the same effect as cranking up on the emergency brake, or e-brake as it seems to be referred to in the drift world. So what does this mean? Probably more upgrades to be ordered!

In the evenings after coming home, I've been putting a pack through the car out in front of the house to get a feel for drifting. My figure eights still suck, and I'm primarily just driving it willy-nilly on the street having fun with no real direction. But now that the stock tires are scuffed up, they seem to slide pretty well. It will be interesting to see how the ABS tires perform. Speaking of which...

New hop-ups have arrived! The first and foremost are the HPI 12-spoke Corsa wheels with 3mm offset, which is 1mm more than stock, but will probably not be noticable at all. I've test-fitted the Streamline ABS tires to them already, but I need to run to Home Depot to pick up some foam weather stripping and electrical tape. Basically, the foam weather stripping and the electrical tape will be wound around the wheel to provide a good friction fit for the ABS tires on the wheel. I've read that if this is done properly, there's no need to actually glue the tires to the wheels. If I find that slippage is a problem, I'll just spot glue the tires to the wheels with some thin CA that I use for regular tires.

Next on the menu is the Tamiya TLU-01 LED light unit. Yessiree, Bob! Lights! Unfortunately, the description said the unit came with two sets of white lights (2 pairs), but it came with one white and one red. I had purchased two additional red in anticipation of having two white sets, so now I have one set of white and three sets of red. Guess I'll be ordering some more light sets with the one-way. On the bright side, the light controller can handle eight sets, so I have plenty of room for expansion!

I'll post pics later. My camera battery is recharging right now.

First Ride

With newly completed body mounted and ready to go, I went out to a parking lot near my house which had a pretty smooth finish on it. It's what is called a broom finish, where they take a broom and lightly sweep the concrete surface just before it has completely cured. This way the concrete is still very smooth, but there's enough texture so that cars don't all become drifters when it rains.

From a complete standstill, I can grab a handful of throttle and make it spin out and keep spinning and keep spinning and...well, you get the idea. After that fun wore out, I decided to actually try to figure eight drifting exercise as outlined on the box. Now the key to initiating the drift seems to be to let off the throttle as you initiate the turn, thus loading the front end and making it easier for the rear to break traction. This worked great, but I found that I was having trouble holding the drift as the tires would still hook up shortly after it started sliding. I attributed this to the broom finish of the concrete coupled with the fact that despite the tires being very hard rubber, they are still rubber.

I then did a few high speed passes followed by throwing the car into a turn, and even at full speed, the actual drift would not last very long. Certainly nothing you would consider to be worthy of some of the scenes from Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. If anything, these turns reminded me of car chase scenes where the car would blast out from a side street and skid momentarily into oncoming traffic before racing off into the distance. Fun, but not drifting.

So I headed off to my old junior high school, which has a long stretch of extremely smooth concrete out in the back of the school. We're talking about the type of surface that gets REALLY slippery when it rains. I put the car down, rolled on the throttle, and what a difference! If anything, it was so loose that it was difficult to maintain control, i.e. avoid hitting the wall or numerouse metal posts because the walkway is only about 8' wide. I'm sure that if I had more space, it would be a little easier to do the figure eight exercise. Unfortunately, my battery decided to expend itself so it was back to the house for me.

The next step will be for me to buy additional wheels so that I can mount the ABS plastic drift tires that I bought off of eBay. These should allow me to get the lack of traction that is desirable for the textured concrete of parking lots and streets that are immediately accessible.

Graphics?! We don't need no steenkin' graphics!

Okay, I know what a lot of you are thinking. You're thinking to yourself, "Self, this doesn't really look too much different from what he posted yesterday." Well, you would pretty much be right on that account. I started applying all of the basic stickers that came with the kit to see where that put me -- windshield banners, hood and front end detail, door handles, etc.

After looking at the remaining available stickers, I decided that I didn't really want to use them, because a) they were more like a rally car, and b) they were a fluorescent green that didn't really go with the red/white paint. I pretty much stuck with white stickers, of which I decided to use only two on the rear and the pig on the driver's side view mirror.



For the headlights and tail lights, I went in search of ready-made light buckets. I found that a guy on the RC Dori forums mounted some in his Subaru, but even with the info he provided me, I couldn't locate any. I search Yokomo's US and Japan sites, but neither even listed them as available any more. Even eBay didn't turn up anything. To be perfectly honest, I don't really see me being able to fabricate even a semi-reasonable facsimile of the light units as depicted by the stickers. So with that in mind, I went ahead and put the stickers on the car. I figure if I do get the LED kit, I'll either mount the LED behind the sticker and leave it like that, or I'll drill enough of a hole to poke the LED through, and glue it in place.

I liked the overall simplicity of the graphics and thought that to add any large scale graphics typically seen on sponsored drifters would take away from it rather than add. So out goes the Year of the Boar/Ram idea, and in comes Minimalist.

At this point, the only additional change to the appearance that I'm going to make will be in the wheels, but that may not be for a while. For now, I'm going to take it out to some smooth concrete and see if I can get it going slidewayz! Catch ya on the drift!

Painted and Trimmed

TA DA! Here it is with the paint completed at last. I trimmed the body, mounted the rear wing and sideview mirrors, and placed the body on the chassis. I have to admit that it came out looking a lot better than I envisioned.

The spray-on window tint did not quite turn out as expected. In the pictures they look like blacked out windows, and the coverage isn't as even as I'd want, but to get it that way would make it even darker. I were to do it again, I think that I would have leave the windows clear.

The progress as of the end of the last post was the painting of the trim, so I guess I should pick up at that point to catch things up.

The original concept was similar to the end product. Originally, I was thinking that the white/red transition area would be defined by two diagonal lines -- the front line running from the bottom-middle of the front door to the top middle of the roof line, and the back line running from just in front of the rear wheel at the bottom to the back of the roof line where it starts curving down. It would form a shape like the tail of an airplane. In this area, I thought about having alternating red and white bars, so it looked like the white front was interlocking with the red rear. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a pain in the rear to mask neatly.

My wife suggested that I should just tear the blue masking tape into strips, because it was much easier that way, and then I wouldn't be so worried about clean edges. I did a few experimental strips, but found they always curved one way or another, which meant the horizontal interlocking bars was out of the question. So my wife, who was on a roll at this point, suggested making it look like the car had driven through the white, and the white was tearing off of the car. Bingo! After a few minutes, I had one side masked. Looking at it, I wasn't quite satisfied, because it just looked like a big jagged zig-zag line, so I tore some smaller pieces to give the effect of tatters flying off. After a short time, I had the other side and the roof masked off as well. One other effect that I hadn't thought of but really like is the fact that the left side is not simply a mirror image of the right. They are completely different. Since the rear was going to be red, I was going to paint that first, so I went ahead and masked off the front of the shell using a couple sheets of paper rather than tape everything. That was the last task for the night.

So this morning, I happened to be looking at my motorcycle helmet, because it was comprised of the colors I was considering. This is truly a coincedence, because the only reason I went with red and white (or silver) was because I had plenty left over from painting the E-Maxx. After discussing this with my wife/graphic designer, we decided to stick with the white, because we agreed that the silver might blend too much with the silver/black snakeskin hood.

The colors that I used were Pactra's Metallic Red (RC264) and Pearl White (RC276) backed with the Fluorescent White Covercoat (RC290). The window tint spray paint is also Pactra, RC294. When I painted the E-Maxx, I used silver as a backing color so I thought this time I'd use the fluorescent white covercoat to see if there was any marked difference. Under indoor lighting, there does not seem to be a difference. If tomorrow is sunny, I'll get a better look at it outside.

Before painting, I decided to go ahead and mask off the tail lights to leave my options open should I decide to attempt to build light buckets. The other option would be to still get the LEDs, but just mount them behind the stickers, in which case having the body clear would allow those to light up even if they don't actually light up the road. I masked the tail lights using liquid mask just to see how well it works. The headlights were done with the blue tape trimmed with an x-acto.

The actual painting took the whole afternoon. Fortunately I only work half days on Fridays, or this would have leaked over into tomorrow. Painting with metallic colors is a lesson in tedium, because it's transluscent, so you have to spray in a lot of light coats. In the case of the pearl white, it's even worse, because the first coat is almost non-existent, which led to me overspraying it which resulted in some pooling. Fortunately after the 5th coat and the backing, it's not too obvious.

Between coats, I used a small fan to help the paint dry. Unfortunately, there were some areas where I got the backer coat a bit thicker than others. As a result, there were some areas with tacky paint even though the majority of the working areas were dry. I must admit that I probably rushed it a little just so I could get it finished since this whole project has been going on all week. I know, shame on me.

As I was removing the masking for the windows, I learned something else about the masking strips -- the paint does not adhere to it as well as it does to the blue masking tape. Why is this important? Remember how I said I used the strips to border the edges and the blue tape to fill in the rest? Well, this leaves a very narrow gap between the edge of the blue tape and the edge of the white strip. When I would pull up the blue tape, it would grab the paint and pull it off the white strips. Then when you pull off the white strips, the paint would slide off the tape, and you would not get an edge to the paint. Now mind you that at this point, the window masking had a few layers of black from the trim, a few layers of metallic red, a few layers of pearl white, and a few layers of fluorescent white covercoat. I ended up taking the x-acto, and using the back of the blade, I would score a line along the edge of the masking tape so that the paint would separate instead of lifting off. It took a little more time this way, but I was able to keep the paint edges neat.

In the future, I think I'll stick with the blue masking tape since it seems to work best for me. The headlights came out looking cleaner than the tail lights, and the liquid mask was a pain to remove. I have a feeling I didn't use enough of the liquid mask. At any rate, I like the results I got from the masking tape much better.

The last thing I did was spraying the window tint on everything but the windshield, but I've already covered my thoughts on the tint. The other downside of the tint is that now the inside of the body has a semi-gray sprayed look instead of the pristing white covercoat. I may mask off the top of the car and re-spray the sides if it bothers me enough.

After all the spraying was done, I trimmed the body. A lot of articles I've ready talk about using a compass knife to cut the wheel wells, but I prefer to simply take my x-acto and score a line around the entire bottom edge of the body. Then it's a simple matter of cutting a few perpendicular lines to make smaller, fairly straight pieces, then snap those pieces off. It leaves a fairly smooth edge that I've rarely had to sand down. The final touch was to mount the rear spoiler and the sideview mirrors.

The next step will be to put the stickers on the body, which means I need to decide on a graphics package. I figure that I'll go ahead and put the ones on that I know won't be covered up, such as the front grill and hood details. I'm thinking about just leaving off the head and tail light stickers for now. Even though you can see into the body, at a distance it looks like they just have the aftermarket smoked covers. I'm also planning on getting some aftermarket wheels for the ABS tires I bought off eBay, but I'm very pleased with the way that the stockers look. Options I'm considering are chrome with red spokes or just basic black. White could be pretty nice, too. Fortunately I have three sets of ABS tires, so I can try a number of looks.

One last item of note. I previously wrote about the antenna wire being too short for the antenna tube's length, resulting in only about 4" of antenna coming out the back. For now, I've decided that I'm simply going to thread the antenna through the back body post holes and run an internal antenna setup. If I notice any performance issues, I'll re-visit this.

Painting and More Masking

This evening I sprayed the masked out trim areas with the black metallic paint. I ran into a couple of issues, which will be good to remember for the next time.

First, it's highly advisable to go back over all of your masks if the body shell has sat idle for a period of time since you finished the masking. I found that somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd coats, some of the masking strips had lifted off the body, allowing paint underneath.

Second, the downside of mixing different types of masking tape materials became evident when I started to remove the masking. Where I had the blue tape on top of the white strips, the paint would actually lift off of the white strips when removing the blue tape. Fortunately I noticed it before it attempted to lift the paint off the lexan surface as well. By removing the white strips along with the blue tape, I was able to get all the masking off with minimal damage to the clean edges.

Third, the cuticle stick has found yet another use. After removing the masking tape, I was able to use the cutice stick to remove the paint that had managed to get underneath. Because it's wood (birch, I think) and somewhat soft (compared to an x-acto or other metal tools), I was able to use the edge of the flattened end to scrape off the unwanted paint. Upon further inspection, I found that there was little to no evidence that there had been any errant paint present.

All things considered, the results were pretty good. I left the window masks in place, since I still have yet to paint the body itself.

Speaking of painting the body, my wife helped me decide what the paint scheme will be. I've got it all masked except for the head lights and tail lights, but the more and more I think about it, the less and less I'm inclined to prep this body for LEDs, because I'm not really sure how I'd go about making light buckets for it. I may still mask it out but apply the stickers on top. Then if I get the LED kit, I'll just put the LED behind the sticker to simulate bulbs covered by the lenses. It won't cast any real light, but it will give the same effect. The other option is to punch a hole thru the body and mount it that way, but I think it'll look kind of funny.

I didn't include any pictures of the mask because I don't want to post any more pics of the body until the rest of it is sprayed, which I hope to do tomorrow.

Window Masks and Trim

Following the widespread advice of spraying your darker colors first, the next step is to paint the black window trim and roof gutter. Rather than try to cut the existing masking, I decided to remove the masking from the CF stage and remask the windows.

Since there are more curves than there were on the hood and trunk, I used a combination of 1/16" and 1/4" masking strips to mask the edges of the windows, and then I filled in the remaining area using the standard blue masking tape. You can see this in the pictures to the left and below. The masking strips are nice because they're actually backed with a thin plastic layer, which allows you to stretch it slightly, which in turn allows the strip to stick flat even when masking curves. I only had to make relief folds for the tighter curves on the rear door windows.

On the front and rear windshields, I actually put the edge of the mask about 1/8" to 1/4" in from the frame to simulate the black border that is found on real auto glass. For the top of each, I will trim the very top of the stock stickers with the Subaru name on it and put those on after the painting is completed. Otherwise, all of the trim will be painted, not stickers.

I think the most difficult part of this process is figuring out just where the edges need to be, because I have to rely on the creases in the body, and it's next to impossible to get the tape to sit right at the crest or valley of those. This will probably be most evident in the roof gutters, which will most likely come out thicker than they should, but I thought it was worth the effort to try and get as much realistic detail as possible. Tomorrow I'll spray it with the same metallic black that I used to back the CF and see how it turns out.

Black and Silver Snakeskin

Okay, so I took one last look at how I would attack the carbon fiber painting, and with cuticle sticks, paint cans, and newspaper in hand, I headed out to the backyard. Fortunately it was not very windy, so that would make things a little easier on me.

I put the newspaper down, flipped the body on its top, and positioned the cuticle sticks in what I thought were key locations while keeping steady pressure on the other end to hold down the shelf liner. Starting with the hood, I painted the whole area with a few quick bursts. Flipping over the body revealed mixed results, which was pretty much expected since this was my first attemp at this. Some areas went really well, but others I could tell that the liner wasn't quite up against the shell, causing the paint to diffuse well beyond the limits of the holes. Regardless, it didn't take more than that first pass to get enough of the silver through. I then tackled the trunk area and got similar results. The lining wasn't quite up against the shell in some areas, yielding more broad fields of diffusion rather than the desired checkerboard pattern.

After letting the silver dry for several minutes, I went ahead and put down the metallic black coats. I started with a very thin coat of black to seal the edges of the masking tape and then followed it up with another four thin coats until I couldn't see any light come through. I think it's enough that the backer coat for the rest of the body will make it truly opaque. So with the black coats done, it was time to reveal the finished product. And...

Hm. Where the silver paint checkerboarded as desired, it looks pretty good, but where the silver diffused, it looks...well...bad. To be perfectly honest, the diffusion patterns make it resemble black and silver snakeskin. Yeah, that's it -- it's not faux carbon fiber, it's snakeskin!

Um, yeah...right

Okay, so what did I learn from this experience? I might be kidding myself, but I honestly don't believe the primary problem was in the execution of the actual painting itself. I think the compound curve detail was a definite contributor to the iffy results. Obviously, the flatter and broader the surface, the better the shelf liner will lay flat. I'm also wondering if I could have found a thinner shelf liner. The material that I have is probably about 1/8" thick and rather spongy, which makes it want to be flat, but not up against a slightly curved body shell. If I do this again, I'll look for something a bit thinner that can maybe be bent to hold its shape a little better. Finally, I think the silver is a bit too bright for this application. A dark gray is really the best color for this application.

Another random thought I just had would be to maybe cut the liner to the shape that I need, and then boil it for a short time to make it more pliable. While it's still hot, you could then form it up against the body so that when it cools, it still retains that shape.

I won't claim this as a victory, but I don't really count it as a failure either. It does look rather unique, though. [C'mon, work with me! :)] In the end, it's nothing a few well-designed and well-placed stickers or decals can't hide, right?

Next Phase: Body Work

Well, after having given some thought to it, I have decided to go ahead and give the body a custom paint job instead of just painting it blue and slapping some stickers on it. I was thinking I might go with a color change paint, but the lhs (local hobby store) didn't have any, and I don't really feel like waiting for it to arrive via ground shipping. I remembered reading about how to paint faux carbon fiber, so I thought, "What the heck, let's give that a whirl." With that in mind, I washed out the body with dish washing soap to remove any oils left behind from the forming process.

The next thing I had to decide was what is going to be CF. I figured the most typical things I've seen are the hood and trunk, so I masked off everything but the hood and trunk. Usually I just mask the bare minimum to get the job done, but once I finished masking the hood and trunk, it was actually less work to just mask in the rest with tape than to use newspaper. I was able to mask the curves by cutting the masking tape into thin strips and using the cuticle sticks mentioned before to tack it down as I went. After I got it down in a reasonable facsimile of the curve, I used the stick to work out any bubbles and wrinkles. Because this body has a lot of detail in it, I considered using a liquid mask, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible for now. I've also read mixed reviews on it, so I thought it best to stick with a known quantity. For those of you who are curious, I'm just using regular blue painter's masking tape. It has worked pretty well for me in the past.

The most commonly mentioned material used to get the carbon fiber checker pattern look is the non-slip shelving liner. As it happens, I had some oversized liners that needed some trimming down, and I sensed an opportunity here. I cut a length off that was adequate for the hood and trunk and proceeded to trim it further to closely approximate the shapes I needed. Once I was satisfied with the shape, I just taped it down on the edges. As you can see, when I spray the paint on, it should leave a checkerboard-ish pattern. All the examples I read on the web said to use gray for the lighter area, but the lhs only had silver. I figured that CF looks kind of shiny anyway, and I'm only going to use one light coat of silver anyway, because I want it to be very subtle. I'll be backing it with a metallic black, which should darken the silver somewhat as well as give the overall look the sheen common to CF when examined closely. Seems like a fairly good rationalization for not using the recommended charcoal gray at any rate.

Here is what the body looks like from the exterior. I'm no expert, but from what I can see right now, it looks pretty good. There are a couple of potential problems I can see right now, which pretty much means this will either come out looking really great or pretty crappy. I'm not seeing a lot of middle ground here. The first thing is that the shelf liner is not very rigid, so it doesn't necessarily stay right up against the surface to be painted. The second is that if you look closely at the hood, there is an air scoop in the middle, which means that the liner kind of hovers over it. One recommendation was to heat up the liner material with a hairdryer, but if I do that, I think that it will make the masking tape adhesive really tacky. If that happens, it will make the rest of the body difficult to paint. I will try putting some weights in it with the body upside down and leave it tomorrow while I'm at work. Hopefully this will help the liner conform to the body contours. The backup plan is simple -- the cuticle stick. I tell you, this thing has more uses than duct tape! While I'm painting, I will simply use the stick to push down the liner so it's right against the surface. I've already marked some points on the liner so I know where to push.

Unfortunately, it got dark by the time I finished the masking, so I wasn't able to get any painting done tonight. Tomorrow I should be able to get the CF effect completed for good or bad. I'll post pictures of the silver only and then the final product. If it ends up looking like crap, I can at least rest easy in the knowledge that I'm not going for any awards!