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.
