Here are some shots of a few of my Hot Wheels and JL customs, restorations, and psuedorestos.

The JL Turbine started out as a Johnny Lightning Vintage casting. Not much to tell – disassembled, stripped, airbrush primed painted using Boyd’s model paints in a Badger. Reassembled with JL rubber tire axles donated from a Corvette Classics casting. As with all my restos and customs, there are no rivets in the base. Reassembly is done with stainless steel aerospace grade button head socket cap screws, size #2-56, length 3/16”. These provide a nice, clean appearance while allowing for repairs, and the heads fit in the space occupied by the original squash-over of the rivet post. Generally, the rivet posts are wide enough to accommodate the threads, but if they’re not, a little aluminum-filled epoxy in the base will provide the required meat.

The Unimog one was a little more work. It’s two Hot Wheels Unimogs with six Racing Champions dirt car big tires. You know, the oval track dirt cars with the off-center wing and one tire bigger than the other out back? Right ... so this took six of those as donors. The top was trickiest, getting the bows of the fabric to blend correctly.

The next one is a little more complicated. This is **5** HW Limozeen castings disassembled, cut, blended, reshaped, combined, filled, smoothed. As with the Unimog, the metal portions of the body were flash resistance brazed in a single operation after careful alignment and fixturing. Worked pretty well, but the clamps must go someplace invisible, since there’s always a little melting where the current hits the casting. The forward engine details are from some late model HW donors – Flashfires, I think – and the ten rubber tires from JL Corvette Classics castings. The interior is detailed and includes a pool below the rear sunroof. The hardest part was reshaping the hood contours to blend with the new extended hood and similar work at the trunk deck just aft of the cabin. Sold on ebay for a bunch.

Fewer parts but more complexity in this stretch. This is a Cadillac Eldorado dual cowl parade car. It’s only two HW ’59 Cadillac Convertible castings, arranged nose1-body2-body1, turning the open 4-seater into an open dual windshield top-up parade phaeton 6-seater. The rear pair of doors frame an arrangement of two forward facing seats plus two rear-facing bulkhead-mounted fold-ups, shown stowed (visible in the second photo.) The top is scratchbuilt from styrene sheet. Since the two bodies are blended between the pairs of doors, I wimped out and used SuperGlue on this one instead of a flash braze. There just wasn’t enough surface area to take the heat and not deform or melt entirely. The six tires are from two JL Stock Car Legends ’70 Montego MX NASCAR castings. Not sure who the driver was, but the color was a perfect match for the rose pearl Boyd’s. The extended nose presented a challenge because of the blend from the fenders to the cowl. Note that this crease now goes all the way back to the new primary cowl in a single line, different from the original. That was a lot of careful grinding, filling, grinding. Sold on ebay and paid for several rare 1/43 miniatures.

Here’s the first few real attempts at restorations ….

The Black Super Van is just about exactly how it should have looked new, except that the repop decals aren’t quite as bright as they should be, and I’m not really happy with the gloss quality of the Testors Model Masters Acryl Clear enamel top coat. Probably won’t use that top clear any more – I find the old Boyd’s by Testors gloss clear far superior. I think they stopped making that, but I’ll bet the regular Model Masters enamel clear is pretty much the same, as long as it’s not the alcohol-thinned Acryl. The wheels are from a 25^th Anniversary car – NOT a “Vintage” series II, but one that said “25^th” on the front. Their redlines are better. Or rather, usually are. Pretty much all Series II “Vintage” 25^th Anniversary cars have “maroon lines”, but many of the Series I cars have real reds.

This Hot Wheels redline Custom Dodge Charger… well, suffice it to say that this was really a hosed casting. It’s a cycle 5 as per the numbers on the inside of the hood, and the casting shows it. There’s lots of deformation across the front fenders, and it had the little jag in the right edge of the hood opening, the bad dent in the leading edge of the roof, the incomplete right right quarter panel over the bumper – all the signs of the last run of that tooling. And to top things off, it was corroded so badly there were pits almost .030 deep on the roof, sail panels, trunk, and top of the driver’s door. I cleaned up most of the problems, but the front fenders are still a bit asymmetrical and there are some pits that didn’t fill properly on the left side. I didn’t want to mess with JB Weld and Alclad yet – this was experimentation with wheel types, primer, filler, and to some extent with polish. The wheels are the good looking but incorrect bearing types from the boxed 30^th Anniversary Twinmill. Paint is Pacific Blue by Boyd’s through a Badger. Looks much better in person than it does in the photo.

I’ll probably tear it down and do it over again when I get the spectraflame-over-Alclad-over-JB Weld thing mastered.

This one isn’t so much as a resto as it is a combination of resto techniques in a pseudo-restoration. This is a Backwoods Bomb the way it might have been done in Spectraflame – a metal base with a cut down interior support post from a Super Van, first attempt at re-plating, vibe polish, and an attempt to duplicate the Spectraflame effect. The plastic base on this truck was garbage. The camper top was pretty messed up, too. And the body was badly corroded. On the right rear truck body there’s still the remains of one big gouge, but I left it and polished through it. Gives the truck a little character. Wheels are from a 25^th Anniversary car. The replating was a tentative formula using Epsom salts dissolved to saturation, distilled double strength vinegar, and pure zinc electrodes with some metal pre-dissolved into the vinegar. Drive was a 10A-capable 0-12V Phoenix power supply. I got the best deposition at just a few volts. It still reduced hydrogen at the plating target, so I’ve got to tune the pH of the electrolyte a bit. It was polished before plating using three ounces of Blue Magic liquid in 2.5 pounds of untreated corn cob in a 12” Cabella’s vibe polisher for about 48 hours, with two short sessions of felt wheel and paste polish on a Dremel during some breaks. It was polished again after plating with about half the time and effort. Paint is Model Masters Clear Green Acryl cut 1:1 with the same brand glycol-based thinner, pumped through a Badger at 35 psi. Top coat is Boyd’s by Testors clear gloss cut 1:1 with Testors #8825 enamel thinner, also run at 35 to 40 psi. Base was also polished and clear coated. Top was brushed hard with a clean new toothbrush with dishwashing soap, and the major plastic rub curls were cut off with an x-acto carefully. Oh, and the scratches in the windshield were polished out with Mequiar’s PlastX. Great stuff, PlastX!

Now I think I’m finally getting the hang of the Spectraflame paint. This Z-Whiz was originally a blackwall metal base version in green, pretty dinged up. This is Tamiya Clear Orange part number X-26 run at 45 psi cut a bit thinner than 1:1 with the matching glycol thinner. Base car was drilled, chemically stripped, replated thinly and vibe polished. Decals are between the Tamiya and Boyd’s clear. The clear was also run closer to 50 psi this time, and also thinned a bit more. It’s not apparent in the photo, but the gloss is almost too high. Decals are RedlineShop.com pieces – very nice, very sturdy but flexible enough to be padded down into the detail grooves, as shown. Wheels are 25^th Anniversary car parts.

Time to start working on some pricier castings. There’s a Mantis, Custom Charger, Custom Cougar, and Gremlin Grinder in the polisher now.