Let me guide you through my thought process and let you inside that part of my brain that does slot car stuff.
A few months ago I found a remote controlled truck which was 1:32 scale, I thought it would be ideal to use in one of my slot car videos so bought it straight away. Looks great, doesn't it?
Then, I started to think how much it looked like the truck in Smokey and the Bandit and that thought went around in my head on its own for a while. I did some more research and the blue truck's rear cab is wrong; the sleeper part is too tall. But the idea was still whirring around so I bought the Burt Reynolds DVD to stoke the fire a bit.
A little later I found that Revell have reissued one of their trucks from 1980 which is now available for less than $30. I wondered about using parts of it to make a resin bodyshell but the size is enormous; the cost of silicone alone would be horrific plus the difficulty of pouring so much in without it setting before the mould was pressurised - all serious problems. Add in the fact that I could never make it for less than the Revell kit, so instead why not just adapt the kit to use my chassis, just like I'd done with the Scalextric Starsky & Hutch car?
At the same time I was developing my chassis to take both a wider and narrower front end, the Pickup Truck needs a wide front axle and my previous version was expensive.
With a new, wide front axle it looked possible to get my chassis under this truck. Time to start!
To get Sheriff Buford T Justice's Pontiac LeMans I first tried to get a 1:32 scale plastic kit, unfortunately one doesn't exist. I then tried to get another scale which I could get scanned and re-size to 1:32, but unfortunately one doesn't exist. Last chance, how about finding a real car which I could scan in myself and get sized to 1:32? No, nothing I could find in the UK and nobody in the US who was up for helping. Time for a rethink...
I found a 3D modeller who was up for creating one from scratch, so I sent him some photos and after 2 weeks this came back
This was a real pain to get 3D printed, the surfaces need to be stitched together with no "leaks" to be printed and this model just wasn't playing fair. After a couple of failed attempts it eventually went to the printers.
I thought there was no need to do a TransAm, after all Carrera make exactly the right one. A brief search through the adverts found that the Carrera one was now fetching very high prices across the world! I sourced a bodyshell and made a mold to produce resin versions.
After watching the movie I noticed that Sally Field's character spent a long time with her head behind the seat, perhaps because the director wanted to see more of her rear pointing towards the camera? That meant my interior had to be something special.
The wheel inserts were made as high detail SLA parts then cast in resin, the graphics were designed slowly because I'm rubbish at them. But the outcome of the TransAm is really nice I think.
I still have the Sheriff's car to sort out, the front end isn't quite right although the proportions are excellent. Graphics are on order, as is the light bar (if you think it will spend much time with a roof on)
And the truck is progressing slowly too. The kit has plastic tires and the axles are too big so I've designed some wheel adapters to take the chrome wheels as inserts. As my chassis only has one rear axle, I've also designed a trailing axle support for the truck and a set of axle housings for the trailer.
The trailer uses a simple pair of axle supports, with location for a pin guide at the rear. I've got some carbon fibre rod to work as a pin guide, but I might have to insulate it because I'm not sure if it'll short out the rails?
More as it happens!
