"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
See what i did there?
hey y'all, hopping on here to share my 2 current WiPs with everyone. i truly hate doing more than one build at a time, but when one is 90% completed...
so the first one is going to be a mystery, anyone have a guess as to what it is gonna be based on the color of the hood and the car? it technically should be a 2005 edition Monte and i bought a 2001 edition before i really thought about it. there IS a difference... i sized this one up with a completed 2005 era body.
(https://i.imgur.com/VvD9J3N.jpeg)
any guesses? i know it's not much to go off of.
this other one, the story isn't so simple. back before i moved in 2021 i used to have to paint models in a shed. so i couldn't exactly paint bodies during the winter months, so i would work on chassis and such and paint the bodies when the weather got nicer. this was one such build.
(https://i.imgur.com/D0XWSNj.jpeg)
(https://i.imgur.com/RWWW2B9.jpeg)
i pulled it out the other day to resume... and i remember why i stalled out. it was supposed to be this car
(https://i.imgur.com/qbgcG0a.jpeg)
but... the Powerslide decals were sized to a resin body that Mike sold before the kits came out. i built it on a Chase Elliott SS kit. needless to day, after fiddling with the huge side panel decals (snipping, cutting, angling, etc) i realized that it wasn't going to work, no matter how much massaging i did.
so now it's going to be this
(https://i.imgur.com/VNMxkPT.jpeg)
the decals should be here this weekend. had to do a lot of work, don't know what was going on when i first started this but the white paint is crappy/orange peeled. also, i had some gouges in the side body slits so i filled them in. and the hood had some gouges in it that were pretty deep, i assume from not taking care when i removed the molded hood pins. sanded and sanded, couldn't get rid of them. ended up filling with putty. the second coat on the hood is drying now. should turn out looking ok.
i chose this particular Dale Jr. build because i was REALLY happy with the stance of the car (not sure what i did with the front but the rear has some 3D printed springs from Brandon Miller that are functional, along with some functional shocks i fabbed out of aluminum tube) plus i had already marked the tires and wheels for #88. so i kinda had to stick with it. i had done some decal work, the hood, roof, tv panel that all had to be peeled off. thinking about trying to salvage the black paint on the tv panel. i had painted a 3D printed superspeedway splitter (again from Brandon Miller) bright red for this, and instead of using it for one of my Ryan Blaney Menards builds that used a red splitter and just grabbing a new one from my stash, i primed it grey, then white, they painted it florescent yellow. gonna represent the car in the photo above, a Talladega win, since i already filled in the jack points in the body (seemed that was done often for superspeedways by this team, see both photos above). also chose that Nationwide scheme because it seemed like the decals would fit, even on the wrong style body.