Custom Hotwheels, or I *finally* finish a project!

Crazy, eh?  I actually "finished" something.  I say "finished" because I think I could have spent hours and hours on this silly little thing.  After 3 repaints, I decided it was time to focus on something important and this needed to be done.  It's good enough.  Learned all kinds of fun things doing this and looking forward to trying a few more.

Fair warning- this post is huge and has a TON of pics...

Made up a bed out of some aluminum scrap.



Trimmed it up and fit it to the body.



Mixed up some JB Weld and glued it on. Also used it to fill in the extra wheel wells.





Glued on the rear panels.





Did some quick measuring and printed out a practice frame on the 'ole 3D printer.







Trimmed up the windows and interior to fit the smaller cab.



Assemble!









Not to shabby for a quick off the cuff job. Now I can measure where the rear wheels need to go and start cleaning up the body. Have to make a few tweeks to the frame as well.

 
Cleaned up the body some more.





Punched a rear window in.



Shot some primer.



I bought a cheapo Harbor Freight airbrush a couple of years ago but have never had a reason to try it out, so here goes! Dug out my ancient dried up model paint and rehydrated them. Mixed some blue with some silver metalic to get a metalic baby blue.



As you can tell, I have no idea what I'm doing... Still fiddling with the airbrush. Think I'm starting to figure it out though.



Put some white on the top. Didn't have any masking, but I figured this was a practice anyways and the paint was probably going to come back off so I tried it anyways. Came out okay until I managed to knock it over and schmear the paint.



End of paint #1, stripped it back to bare metal to give it another try.

Attempt #2 at painting...  Airbrushed some white on after a fresh coat of primer.





Let it dry and then taped it off.



Mixed up some new blue paint- little darker this time but I like it better than my first attempt.



Peeled off the mask. It's... okay. Need to turn my air pressure down a bit I think but good enough for a first (second) attempt. Will try some light buffing when it's cured to smooth it out a little, actually looks a bit better than in the soooper up close pics.





Remember this was a "practice" to see what I can screw up. Take this, for example. My .50 cal cannon fell on the single cab.



Which of course, means experiment time! Tested a few different polishing techniques.

Wire wheel. Meh.



Buffing wheel with buffing compound. TOOO much.



Although when you clean it up it gives it a bit of a well used patina.



And lastly, buffing wheel with Turtle Wax. Worked out pretty well- smoothed the paint out and gave it a bit of shine. Just have to be real careful you don't rub through the paint.


*sigh*... Strip it back to base metal and try for repaint #3.

While I had it stripped AGAIN, I filled in the extra bits and tried to smooth out the joint.

here. You happy?!



Wheel donor:



Parts.



New frame design. Front wheels go in from the top, back wheels go in the bottom and are held in by the little piece.





Just settin together.





Check out the fart-can baja style exhaust pipe.



 Also plan on making yet another frame- will fill in the holes around the "engine" and adjust a little more for better fit. 

Getting close now!

Detail work...

Parts.



Amazing what you can do with some model paint and a toothpick. Now if I just had a steady hand.









Think I liked it in primer better.








So here you go, my first "custom" hot wheel. I think I could have spent several more hours re-doing things but it was time to call it good. As may have been mentioned a time or two, I have other projects that are getting neglected.

I think it turned out pretty good, but I have a long ways to go on the detail work.









Close ups.  You can sort of see the metallic flake in the the blue from the silver I mixed in.









Opening windows could have been a little closer...






Fun stuff.  Ultimate hobby / time-waster- takes a fair bit of skill to do right (this ain't done right...), it's not really expensive (but could be), and it definitely doesn't take up a lot of space!

Here's what I was basing my project on.   Frankie Floods single cab:

Mendelmax 2.0 in the classroom!

Our school district PR guy came to my class last week to take pics... Heres the scoop.  He took several great pics, most of which I've posted here but you can see the entire album on the Districts Facebook page here:  District 55 Tech Class


Without further ado, here they are.

Students finishing up their Sketchup projects. Yes, we have ancient computers.  When I started teaching here almost 4 years ago, I only had TWO, so I'm not going to complain!









The printer... Y'all have seen it before it here it is in it's "home".  Had to slightly modify the desk so it would fit.



The heli's final resting place.



Edumication. Walked them through the process of exporting the file from Sketchup as an .stl, repairing it in Netfabb, and finally loading and positioning in Repetier.



Explained to them how Slic3r worked and showed them a few of the basic settings, then we sliced. They were pretty impressed that we generated 18,000 lines of code for one simple car. It was fun to make them think math for a bit- vectors / coordinates on an X/Y grid, and explain to them a few different g-codes and how the computer interpreted them the same way they do in their math classes.



Business end of the printer all set up and ready to go.



One of my most useful tools- a webcam, duct taped to a light arm. I can point it anywhere (including my monitor) so they can see what I'm doing up close on the screen without having to crowd around me.



What they see on the screen:



Annndd..... PRINT!







Not real great quality because I had the speeds cranked way up so they could see it finished during class.  This print only took about 12 minutes-  10% infill.



Explain some of the capabilities- manufacturing custom parts for Hotwheels.



Yeah, this pic... "BEHAVE, or I shall turn you into this vile blue goo!"


Got a bunch more done- up to 26. Have just a few to finish up and then we start printing wheels.




Print quality is much better on these but still getting some defects.  Think its a combination of things, mainly the fact that the desk the printer is on tends to shake as the printer runs.  Plan on doing some experiments there in the future.



The students love watching the printer run... We had a test on sketchup / printers on Friday, which I haven't had a chance to look through yet but one of the questions was about what they thought the future would bring to the 3D printing scene. Kind of excited to see what they think!

I'm still impressed with the Mendelmax 2.0.  I ran it over 8 hours straight one day and about 6 the next with no issues whatsoever.  It's been a long process getting bugs worked out and everything working, and I have a ways to go still as I learn more and attempt new things, but the printer has been more than up to the challenge.

Makers Tool Works, job well done!  

Just because I don't have ENOUGH things to do...

I started something new today.  I've been wanting to try my hand at building custom Hotwheels for a while now, and figured it was time to give it a shot.  Actually, I hold Dj iWeb fully responsible for all of this... I keep seeing all of his awesome customs. I have one project in mind that I really want to try, but I don't want to screw that one up so I came up with a "practice" project. 

My practice project is based on a Volkswagen single cab a fellow I know is restoring.  You can see his real true (baby) blue single on his blog: http://frankieflood.blogspot.com/ You might have to scroll though a fair bit of stuff to find pics of his single cab but he has a TON of cool stuff on there anyways, so have fun!

Without further ado, my latest figure-something-out project. Start with these guys. Almost too cool to chop up. Thats why I bought 3.





Drill the rivets out.



Get out the die grinder / demel and start hacking.









Strip the paint off. Just spray some paint stripper on there,



Let it sit for a bit, and wipe or blow it off.



Took a few coats but it came out fairly clean.







Lotsa fun, eh? I plan on making a bed for it later and gluing it together, but I havent decided if its going to have dual rear axles or just a single.  Probably just a single- which means I have to fill in the middle wheel wells.  I'd have to fill 'em in anyways, they are just too far forward.

I really enjoy this kind of project-  simple, doesn't require a lot of work, and most of all (for me anyways), its one of those projects that doesn't require a whole lot of prep.  Grab a saw, and start cutting.  Hopefully it turns out right!  Course, now I'm going to end up spending hours and hours trying to get things just right only to screw something up and have to start over.  Part of the learning process!

Dan's Chariot #2- Materials Testing and Welding Practice.

Did some "testing" today on the square tubing I plan on using for Dan's Chariot. Met with Dan's parents last week and they gave me the go-ahead and also got me some money so I ordered parts!  The tubing I have is 1" square, fairly thin walled pipe.  I knew it was strong, but when I dug it out of the pile it was a lot thinner than I remembered.  Even though it seemed pretty stout, I decided a few tests were in order.  Turns out I can stand on a 4' span of the square tubing and jump up and down with no bending. There is a little bit of flex but it's very minimal.  The axle part is only going to be 3' wide, so it should be more than strong enough to support all of Dan's weight and withstand the occasional pothole.  The tongue will be quite a bit longer, but I'm planning on balancing Dan over the axle as much as possible so their shouldn't be much tongue wieght.

I also zapped a couple of quick, yucky, crappy welds. Then I proceeded to bash them to pieces with a hammer. Great fun after a day chasing students.

First attempt.  Still playing with the welder trying to get the best settings.  Just using my 110v Wire Feed welder (flux core wire) for now, but may do a couple of tests with the TIG welder later...





Second attempt.  Liking my settings a lot more, but I still have to move pretty fast or it'll burn through.





Managed to finally get one weld to break which you can see in the first pic on the second attempt. It was just plain a bad weld- and it only went half way across. If I can get them to all look like the last pic, I'll be happy. The tubing I have is a lot thinner than I thought it was, but I feel confident it is more than strong enough for my purposes, and my bash tests seem to imply that the (crappy) welds are MUCH stronger than the base metal.

Got some tracking notices today, so the seat and wheel parts should be here early next week. Once I have the seat, I will start working on a mount for it and figure out exactly how the frame needs to be to attach it.  For now, here's the latest plan with relatively to-scale wheels and seat.



Current thought is to weld the axles to the frame cross bar, like this:



But I'm not sure I like that. Will probably do a few test and try and break one or two just to see how strong that is. I'm a little worried about welding a solid chunk of steel to a much thinner piece. Have a few other ideas, we'll just have to see what works!