Cyberpunk Mx-5 Build

Definitely getting closer to the finish now. Now that the case is done I am going to shift my focus back to the moulds. I've just got to polish up the ones I made and then have a look at the first pair again but my goal is to start making these kits within the next few weeks. There has been some interest internationally so I plan to look into shipping worldwide if I can.

That sucks to hear about Redbubble. It didn't even occur to me but it makes sense that a lot of the artists making those designs probably wouldn't be making the stickers. I hope that the ones I got at least checked with the artist.

Other than that, I did the last finishing touches to the deck. I had to come up with some way of holding the screen open so I went with these small metal cables.





The plan was to use an old inverter to power the screen off the cigarette lighter, but it turned out the inverter was dead so I may look at getting a replacement. For now it works fine with an extension cable.







It's a snug fit but surprisingly comfortable and there's just enough space for it all. My next step for this is to make a quick little stand for it to hold it in place and then that's most of the interior work done. I'll probably fit that in around working on the flares since I'm keen to get back into them and see when I can have them ready for sale.

 

Appreciate all the feedback, it's good motivation to get the last bit of work done.

So over the past couple days I've been sorting out some issues on my other project car. I finally had enough of it and gave it to the shop to fix which means I was able to bring this one back into the barn to get the last of the work done on it. Working on cosmetics is so much less stressful than bullshit engine stuff.

First up was trying to get this oil cooler mounted.



While mocking up placements for it I realised I really needed to have the canards on there so I could make sure I got the right placement on the cooler. So out came the cardboard and templates and eventually I had a design transferred over to some aluminium.



After finishing one I made the matching one and then made some small brackets to mount it all up.





I also went ahead and fitted some latches to the front bumper to make it easier to remove, always a win.





Given that it had taken almost 2 days to get these canards made by this point, and I thought they looked alright I moved on to the cooler.

Turns out the original placement I had looked fine so I made some brackets up out of steel and screwed them into the rigid plastic bumper support and fitted the cooler and finished up for the night.





Came back this morning and decided I hated how much the canards flared out so spent a couple hours trimming them back down until I eventually had a shape I liked.





The car is looking pretty busy up front but that's probably because it doesn't have the rear spoiler and wing on at the moment to balance out the back end. But, with the exception of the coolant lines and some antennas for the roof, that's the entire exterior finished now. Which means that I can start having a look at fitting the wrap in the next update.

 

The Wrap Update part 1

I was super keen to get stuck into this wrap, but since wrapping is completely new to me I made a list of things to watch out for:

-Don't wrap on your own, get a friend to help you apply the wrap in difficult areas.
-Don't use cheap Chinese wraps as they are often more rigid and have terrible adhesion.
-Definitely don't wrap in cold weather as this can make the vinyl even more firm and unworkable.
-Avoid learning how to wrap by combining all these things and doing it on your own, in a dusty barn, with a terrible quality wrap, during winter with temperatures far below the recommended application temperature.

So with all that ignored I started applying this absolute garbage wrap in my freezing barn by myself. You'll never guess how it went.



Not bad you're probably thinking. Wrong.





After struggling with this fucker for about 30 minutes, constantly hitting it with the heat gun just to stop it ripping apart in my hands, the back end of it lay down on the quarter panel and decided to just rip a hole in itself.



On top of that, I noticed that even though it obviously had no trouble sticking to the fresh epoxy primed surface, there were a lot of dust particles trapped in the primer that showed through as specks under the wrap. So I was going to have to wet sand the whole car to fix it.

At this point I was keen to just paint it, since that would probably be easier now. But nope, satin gunmetal paint is not something that I can really pull off / afford so oh well. Keep trying with this dogshit wrap I guess.

Start by peeling the current wrap off...



Fucking.. H*CK!

It decided to pull off the entire back corner of the boot and I ended up with the exact same problem I had on the doors. Sanded it all flat, wet sanded it to 1200 and then had another go.

The wrap immediately ripped right in the middle.

Cut off another piece and had ANOTHER go, VERY FUCKING CAREFULLY this time.



And done. EZ. Did a seam across the edge because I have a spoiler going over it and CBF dealing with all the bunching.

Now to just do that to the entire rest of the car. After wet sanding the whole thing.

Naturally with the experience of an entire bootlid under my belt, I decided to tackle probably the hardest panel on the car, the rear quarter panel.





EASY. No problem at all. It only took about 2 hours of me standing there cursing in 3 different languages and inflicting mild 3rd degree burns on myself as I juggled a razor blade, heat gun and my will to live, in my increasingly sweaty hands.

But fukn' eh, looks pretty alright though.

Time for a break though I think.



I decided the passenger needed some murder spears to hold the cyberdeck and also to viciously impale their genitals in the event of a crash.

Threw some black paint on it...



Mint!

Since I was on a roll I decided to take care of the doors, bonnet and front bumper.



The bonnet vent got a coat of matt black. It feels pretty obvious to me that the wrap is going to struggle with the small cutouts over the valve cover, so I decided to paint these areas instead.

Next up were the doors and bumper. Since the yellow was almost transparent, I needed to re-prime the panels in white. While doing that, I hit the edges of them all with some grey primer as pre-shading, and then smoothed it all out with the white.



It's a very subtle effect that is pretty common in model making. Basically you just increase contrast by darkening all the hard and exterior edges. And all it takes is a really small amount because when you put the yellow on...





I freaking love this colour. 100% the right choice.



I could only get the colour in enamel, not 2k, so it's going to take a few more days to cure before I can wetsand the clearcoat and apply the rest of the wrap over the car. I was worried it might fade, but I have my helmet up on the shelf in the back of the barn painted with the same paint and it's lasted about 5 years in direct sun so she'll be right.

So in the mean time I started looking back into the fiberglass.



I had another look at the first "final" moulds I made for the other side and after quickly polishing it up I had a look to see how bad the mark from the bracing was.



It's really difficult to get a photo of but it really stands out in person, and in fact I'm pretty sure it's worse than before. So unfortunately going to have to re-do the moulds for this side which sucks but oh well. Learning.

I went over the 2 mould that I just finished as well and wetsanded and polished them to an A-grade finish, so I can make some pulls from that in a couple weeks time maybe when I'm ready to work on all the flares.

I also made a start on the mould for the front lip.



I decided to make the base for the flanges out of this warped ass plywood. I've been in pride marches that were straighter than this thing.





Got it gluing down this afternoon and now I wait for that to harden up and then I can try and get this finished while I wait for paint to dry. I'm pretty sure the flanges I have in mind should work but if not then oh well, more practice.

I was really hoping to have more of the wrap on but at least the paint is done.

I've also decided to paint the flares, lip spoiler, roof spoiler and front lip in a gloss gunmetal that should be a little darker than the satin. This will match what I rendered and should also make the flares stand out a little more since I'm trying to sell myself here, gotta make them pop you know.

But yeah, even though this wrap is proving to be a nightmare, I'm happy with where it's heading.

 

The Wrap Update part 2

It's taking me slightly longer than I had expected. Both because putting wrap on in the cold is a really shit job and because my paint samples never arrived so I had organise re-delivery.

Last update I started working on the mould for the front lip. Basically I needed to make one of these in case anybody that wants a kit doesn't already have the lip. I'm going to be avoiding selling the lip on it's own because I hate the idea of selling counterfeits, and hopefully most people would prefer to buy a genuine plastic lip instead of the fiberglass one anyway.





Since my plastic one was a little old, it had some warp to it. I warmed the whole thing up with a heat gun to soften it and then put in a number of braces and clamped it all down to get it much closer to it's original shape.

After that I fitted the flanges and smoothed out all the seams with some fillets. Most mould makers will use a filleting wax but personally find that since I'm sanding it all anyway, I like to use a little bit of body filler spread with my finger. You can clean it up quite nice with a little bit of acetone and in the end you hardly have to sand at all.



Next was primer and then after that had dried, wet sand the plug to 2000 grit, cut and polish and start waxing for gelcoat.





Threw on 2 good coats of the vinyl ester tooling gelcoat. Let them go just slightly tacky before putting on the skin coat, 1 layer tissue and 1 layer of 225 gsm mat, let it dry and then loaded up 7 layers of 450 gsm. Starting to look like I know what I'm doing when it comes to fiberglassing now.





The glass went on over a few days. The next morning after the final layers went on I demoulded it and cleaned up the edges.



Came out really good. No defects in the surface, no wrinkling, really good laminate thickness all over and it was rigid as hell. I was going to trim the edges and then make some wooden bracing for it but that turned out to be unnecessary. This thing is solid. And it gets screwed to the bumper every 6 inches or so, so even if the pulls from it do twist slightly, fitting it to the car will straighten it out.

Another thing about this lip is that it's had the ends trimmed off to facilitate the offset on the wheels. So even if anybody did try to buy this as a way around getting a genuine one, it would be missing the corners. The flares hide it obviously but it's another reason why I don't plan on selling it without the full kit or as a replacement for someone who already bought one.

But yeah, then I polished up the mould and now I've got a full set of moulds to begin selling an Alpha version of the kit. (I'm going to re-make the drivers side moulds when I start on the other mx5)



Pretty stoked about all that. I'll try putting up a listing or something in the for sale section or I might just deal with PMs until I figure out how I'm actually selling and shipping these things.

The next thing I did was paint out the rear of my hard top. Couple coats of gloss black epoxy. Just got to wait for it to dry fully then I can wrap this roof as well.





And then the wrap. So as I mentioned, wrapping in the cold with real cheap wrap is an absolute pain in the scrotum, but I had nearly 30m of roll here so even when I ripped sheet after sheet of it, there's always more.

but here it is,



Wrap's done on the whole drivers side of the car. Cutouts for the door and bonnet vent as well.



I had a lot of offcuts that I've been placing on the flares to see whether I like them the same colour. I also tested some satin black tape on the rear and I definitely prefer a darker accent on the flares.



As I mentioned, I'm still waiting on some paint cards to arrive that should hopefully have a darker gunmetal paint that I can put on the flares, front lip, and rear ducktail to get it looking closer to my initial rendering.



It's definitely cleaner in photos than it is in real life. Glue lines everywhere on this wrap, the wrap itself has a grain or texture to it from terrible printing and the other day while taking the roof off it slipped in the cold and fell right on the rear corner panel, leaving a dent and a good tear in the fresh vinyl.

There are plenty of issues though so not really worth worrying about. I dropped the heatgun on the bumper and it burned through the paint, I had these wires from the light bar resting on the paint for 1 day and they left these marks in it.



If I wasn't aiming for a slightly weathered look with this car I would be pissed, but I'll just cover it with stickers or battle damage so it's fine.

My goal for the next update is to make new flares and a lip from my moulds and have the gunmetal paint arrive so I can start on that. Then hopefully the car should be getting really close to done and I can start doing cool shit like weathering and post shading all the panel lines.

 

I've been feeling almost the same way about the front to be honest, except for me I think it was that there were too many colours that just didn't look right. I'm still trying to get it as identical to the sketch as possible, pretty much for principle now more than anything. I did some messing around with black tape and a bit of photoshop to see how it looked without all the colour.



Definitely an improvement so went ahead and fixed them up on the car. I needed to paint the welds on my light bar anyway but I didn't want to permanently get rid of the colour so I just wrapped it with electrical tape for now.





We'll see how it looks now when the car goes back together after wrap.

 

The Wrap Update part 3 (FINAL because I am done with this shit wrap)

Going back to that front lip, I used the mould to get a new lip and also to test my technique since this was my first time using this new gelcoat.



The layup went about as well as I expected, what I was not expecting was how easily it released from the mould, I barely had to use any wedges to pop it out.



Unfortunately I messed up with the gelcoat, I'm guessing some brush strokes made the gelcoat thinner in spots and it ended up triping in quite a few spots along the surface.



Nothing a grinder and some body filler can't fix. Trimmed off the flanges and checked that it all works and it fits the bumper perfectly and also fits into the flares as well.



I'd like to avoid these sorts of defects on any parts I intend to go to other people so since I have to make another one for my red mx5, I'm going to try spraying the gelcoat instead and see if that gives it a more uniform finish and hopefully stops the triping.

Another small thing that I got done was the inside of the hard top. I sprayed the whole thing with primer because the fiberglass looked pretty shit and I fitted some velcro for the cargo net.



For the velcro on the cargo net itself, the adhesive wasn't going to hold so I had to sew the thing on. Ended up pretty good and I really like the way it looks in the car too. Got some dust or something on the lens so sorry about the shit photo.





Plan is to fill it with small packages to help sell the "Futuristic Courier" kinda vibe I'm going for. Deliveries and getaways, with a very small amount of illegal street racing on the side.

Since I'm getting close to the end there have been just a tonne of smaller more random things which makes these updates kinda all over the place. While I was doing all of this my samples finally arrived for the paint.



With photoshop, I took a bunch of photos with the sample card all over the flare and compiled them together to get an idea of the colour.



And then with all the samples I went ahead and photoshopped the flare to match what the colour would be.



I'm glad I did because for some reason, I'm not really feeling it. Like it's too warm or something, too saturated and not exactly dark enough for me. I'm basically going to just bail on this paint option and just go to Bunnings tomorrow and get a few cans of some Rustoleum Metallic Black Stainless Steel spray paint. It's a bit darker and I don't need to clear coat it which makes it easier. I can always strip and repaint if it fades, but I'm expecting that it will probably last longer than this wrap tbh.

I took the car out of the barn for a bit to turn it around so I could finish the wrap on the other side and while it was out I decided to fix up the rear ducktail and garnish piece and get them primed along with the front lip.



Then finally I could get on to the wrap. The first panels to do were the door and the front gaurds, these were the easiest but when I was putting them back together the guard got misaligned and pinched some of the wrap right off the edge of the door. Don't care, weathering.



Then I tackled the rear quarter panel and for some reason it just really wasn't happening. I have no idea how I managed to do the first one in one attempt because I wasted 4 pieces of wrap trying to get this one on. I had the heater going and the heat gun but goddam, it just really wasn't having it. In the end it took about 4 and a half hours non stop but on the fifth attempt I went down well enough for me.

Then I had a crack at the roof. Nope. Not happening, Fuck that. I'm just going to get another can of paint from the store and do the roof as well.

The last 2 panels to go were the rear garnish and the rear bumper. I was contemplating just skipping them and painting them as well but since I had shit tonnes of wrap left I thought I might as well try. And it worked. I used 2 pieces on the bumper, and 3 for the garnish. They look kinda shit up close but...



Then with some of my offcuts I just started messing around.



I think it's crackup, and frankly it's the little pick me up I needed after dealing with this shit for the past couple weeks. But now at least I can say I am done with this wrap. It is going back in the box and getting thrown into a pit because there would need to be something seriously wrong with me to ever want to deal with this wrap again.

Next update is going to be practically Zen because I'll be messing with fiberglass again and painting all the pieces and maybe even assembling. I like these things, I can do these things.

 

Mega update time.

So here's where we started,



I threw the Yoshi can on but there was still lots to do. We had primer on the ducktail and lip but the flares still needed making and everything needed priming. As I mentioned last time I popped in to Bunnings and picked up some supplies.



Now that I had my paint but more importantly my thinners, I could go ahead and tackle some of these panels. First up was to sand the whole roof back and give it a coat of primer.



With that taken care of I moved on to the exciting stuff, painting the ducktail and the newly made front lip.





Absolutely love this colour, and the spray quality from these cans was surprisingly good on these parts. However I didn't want to risk it for the bigger panels so I ended up emptying out the rest of the cans into a small bucket and letting the propellant leak out of it over a few days so I could spray it through my HVLP gun.

The paint dried super quick and so that same night I risked it and lightly bolted it down to the car.





Ties together with the muffler really nice and it just sort of wraps up the whole rear end. Safe to say I'm loving it at this stage eh.

Now was time to crack out these moulds and start fiberglassing some new flares.

Started out by waxing my moulds, got them to the highest polish yet and then gave them a quick wipe with the PVA release film.



This time I wanted to experiment so I tried spraying the gelcoat on instead. I bought a 3.0mm nozzle gun a while back and have been meaning to use it, so I went ahead and tested that out.



Absolute fucking disaster haha. The gelcoat ended up setting inside the gun as I was spraying it, clogged the whole thing, then I quickly tried to grab a brush and get on enough of a layer so that I could at least come back and peel it off after. Ended up having to take the whole gun appart and leaving it to soak in acetone and then cleaned out all the semi cured gelcoat.



Came back about 15 mins later after giving the gelcoat time to harden and then just peeled away.



Luckily it cleaned up really easy, but some spots I had to use acetone to wipe away which meant that the wax was gone too. Pushed my plans back a day as I then had to re-wax the whole mould so I could try again tomorrow.

Next morning, reapplied my PVA and then brushed on the gelcoat. Good coverage but a little thin in spots.



Then let that go tacky and started the layup. Testing a few different things this time as well. Normally I would throw a layer of tissue on followed by some 225 gsm chopped strand mat as my skin layer, but this time I mixed in some microfibre filler powder in with some resin and made a kind of mayo consistency filler that I applied over all the sharp edges over the gelcoat and then went over that with a single layer of 225. Was much faster than laying out the tissue by hand and uses much less material as well.

Gave the skin coat a full day to cure, then came back and sanded it down and hit it with another 2 layers of 450 for strength and that was the rear flare finished.



Between the layers of fiberglass on the rear flare I also got stuck in to the front. Starting with the gelcoat, this time I mixed a little more to try and get a thicker coat but it started setting on my while brushing it on and got a few thin spots. As well as some chunks of gelcoat hardening and making sharp little bumps that I would have to sand out before the skin coat or else it would trap air bubbles.





Ended up giving this one much longer to cure, almost all day and then applied the skin coat at the end of the day.

Same process for the front and rear. Within a few days they had both fully cured, with roughly 18 hours in the moulds after the final layer to make sure they don't warp after coming out and then I had some very clean pulls.







The front came out perfectly since I gave the gelcoat more time to cure. Unfortunately some of the thinner spots on the rear flare ended up triping the gelcoat down the bottom.



Now I just had to trim the flanges off the flares, sand the edges down, check for voids / air bubbles and then grind and fill the defects.

 

A quick once over of the flares showed that it was just that one spot that really needed repairing, I also found that all the edges where I tried that new filler, ended up with no air bubbles at all. The only bubbles I did get were only on edges that I didn't apply the filler to because I ran out. So I'll be doing that from now on for sure. Nobody likes filling air bubbles.

I trimmed the flares down and started test fitting them on the car.



The rear was straight forward but the front required me to assemble the front end of the car again so I could get good fitment on the bumper and the lip.



Now was as good a time as any to start connecting the lightbar back up along with the oil cooler. You'll see I got some rubber lines for it. I still plan on doing the clear lines with pink coolant through them but I'm going to do all that accent colour and underglow at a later stage, for now black lines would do.

Got the front flare on and lining up with everything.



Here's how the front was looking at this stage,



Unfortunately in that photo you can see that there is a slight gap bewteen the flare and the front bumper, right in the middle between the side marker and the front lip.



It was about a 5mm gap in the middle there. I started freaking out thinking there would be this hideous gap forever and it was in the mould now so if anybody bought this kit then this would just ruin all the effort I had put in.

After some brainstorming I realised that it was probably to do with there being a new fiberglass lip installed and it probably wasn't the same twist as my old plastic one. I went behind the fender to have a look and see if there was a way to fix the fitment.



Here you can see daylight blasting through the gap, as well as seeing how the lip and the bumper bolt up. I realised that since the lip was now far more rigid than the bumper, I could pull the bumper out a bit more and screw it to the lip in a new position that would hopefully make the bumper and the flare line up a bit better.



I ended up moving one screw, and straightened out the metal bracket that holds the bottom corner of the bumper. Result was now a perfect fitment.



So relieved to know that there is a simple fix not just for me but for anybody having fitment issues.

Now that the flares were lining up and all the wrinkling had been fixed they were ready for primer. I started sanding them all down as well as straightening up my Ebay roof spoiler. (Reassuring to see how garbage the competition can be)



Now it was time to prime. Hell yeah, this is the good part. I started off by moving the car out of the barn so I didn't have to worry about overspray and even with no flares on it I just love the way this thing is starting to look.



Threw some primer on the flares, roof spoiler, and even the front canards as well and then left them overnight to cure up.



The roof was already primed so I ended up painting it while I was still fitting the flares, before the primer had gone on the other parts. Sanded the whole thing down with 400 on the DA and then masked it up and beat the shit out of it with some paint.





Now that the roof was painted I really had to see how it looked on the car, but it was already getting dark. It was getting dark... and I have a crazy light bar...



Oh man, this car just gets better and better.

Went to bed that night just staring at photos of the car. Don't judge me, I know you guys do the exact same thing.

That brings us to this morning. I just wanted to get out here as soon as I could. Sanded it all down firs thing in the morning and had to really force myself to wait for it to warm up a bit before I could paint.



I was being incredibly careful with my coats since I thought that the 5 cans might not have been enough. I ended up with the thinnest possible coats and about a capful of paint leftover. The finish was good for no paint booth and there were no thin spots so I was stoked about that, but the paint itself has some splotchyness to it from the metallic pigment that I would have loved to go 1 more coat on. It is what it is.

The roof spoiler and canards then got painted satin black. Just out of a can but the finish is pretty good on smaller parts.



Then I spent all day just walking around literally waiting for paint to dry. After about 6 hours I came out and very gently started putting it all back together. I fitted the wing with it's clear struts, fitted the canards, making sure everything was off the fresh paint, refitted my latches to the whole car, bolted down the ducktail and then that just leaves us at this.

 

Thanks dude, Yeah I'm over the moon with how it's finally come together. It looks so nice at this stage I kinda don't want to weather it but I know that will take it to the next level.

I'm in contact with a couple of shows in NZ right now which may determine what final decals end up going on the car. I also just decided to hit up an international distributor to see if they would be interested in stocking the kit because that way it might make international shipping a little cheaper and make the whole order a little more stress free. Nobody really wants to pay for shipping from the bottom of the world haha.

But ye, version 1 of the kit is now ready for sale. The flares fitted to the car is exactly how they come out of the mould, no filler work at all so it should give a good idea on the quality of the fiberglass.

 

Thanks guys, I think we're all equally surprised to see this project actually make it this far.

Haha, and no fiberglass in these nostrils, not after I spent over 2 months (correction: over 1 month) in hospital because of my defective lungs collapsing for no reason. I don't take any chances, got my respirator on every time I'm out there.

So it's been a little while, time to give you guys an update on what's happening. Lots of writing in this one but too many pictures so I'm breaking this update into 2 and the second part is all pictures pretty much so bear with me.

First off I decided to finally start putting the interior all back together. I found that a couple of my old gauges for the Silvia fit perfectly in the center air vents so I just chucked them in there for now. I also fitted both the cargo net and the window netting.







I got the inverter working. With this running off the cars battery it puts out just enough power for the monitor to work in the deck.







I debated for ages on whether I should patch the rips in the seats but part of me feels like that run down look really suits the cyberpunk theme I'm going for. All the parts for this are supposed to look like they were salvaged from a junkyard and so I reckon they fit the bill.

There is still one more thing that any good cyberpunk car needs...



How can you possibly have a futuristic tofu delivery vehicle without throwbacks to the most iconic modification of the early 2000's auto scene?



Underglow is badass. It can be tacky as fuck but that just makes it perfect for this build. I've seen a resurgence in it lately and I am 100% on that wagon. This is just a test fit of some stuff I had leftover from other projects, I'm working right now on trying to get some that can match the pink trim I'll be running.

So I've been talking around trying to find new events where I can take this as my contact for the show I had originally planned to go to just went AWOL on me. I ended up bailing on that and contacting the organizers of Auckland's Armageddon Expo (basically a NZ Comicon) and just out of absolutely nowhere they said they were keen to have it parked up by the front gate. So looks like I'll be taking this to a show towards the end of the month. Farkn stoked about that.

Another thing that I've been planning is a proper photoshoot and a small video that I want to make for it once it's done. Managed to bribe one of my close mates to drive over an hour up to the farm so we could go out at sunrise the next morning and test some shots with his badass camera that cost more than my car.





These shots came out goddam sick, cant wait to finish the car and tackle the final shoot for it.

Another reason for the fancy camera was that I got in touch with an online collective of photographers that aim to uncover the worlds most exciting car culture stories. I thought I was dreaming at first but I actually got an email back saying that they were interested and wanted to know if I could get some proper shots of it for an article and maybe even a small video. Seriously cool shit but I've had plans fall through before so I'll save on getting too excited until it actually happens.

So with all that out of the way lets get into what I've really been working on.

 

So just a quick refresher for everyone, this is the rendering I did quite a while back and I've been making it my mission to get the real thing as close as possible.



So some noticeable differences between it and the real deal are the livery on the doors and the pink accent colour on the wheels and window banner.

Doors first.



Design created in photoshop, printed off and stuck to the door.



Vinyl applied to door, stencil over top. Whole thing cut out by hand. (yes that paint under it is covered in knife marks now)



Finished product.





Translation is just "Tofu Auto Works" in Japanese. Writing it in a different language makes me seem like less of a shill trying to promote his own business.

Next was the window banner. In NZ the maximum legal size for a window banner is 100mm. Here's what that looks like.



Looks like shit. Try 140mm instead.



Much better. But now that fake Speedhunters sticker finally has to go.

Now that I knew how big to cut it, here's my first attempt with this shiny new rose pink vinyl.



Second attempt had a similar outcome. That was when I learnt not to cut the letter in the wrap and instead applying them over top as a separate layer.

Third attempt.



Nice.



The process: Apply pink film to window, cut out letters on silver film, mark out spacing on red film, apply silver letters.

These letters are just going to peel straight off. This silver wrap is just absolute dogshit. Going to need to re-wrap the thing in less than a year I can already feel it.

Next, wheels.



All 4 are different designs. Because.



Then smaller stickers went on followed by the roof spoiler finally and I pushed it outside for photos.















The rear garnish is off because the wrap just wont stop lifting up on it. Going to try and find some paint that's a similar colour to the silver on the car and just paint both the garnish and the rear bumper. Fuck this wrap. Bullshit.

I also need to repaint my roof spoiler because my primer layer was too thin and I can see the bog patches.

Also gotta paint the edges of the rear bumper black so you cant see them from inside the flares.

And then I gotta weld up the exxxhaust. Mate of mine is coming up to teach me how to TIG so prepare for some heinous looking welds to come soon.

Underglow, still need to find that.

Repaint that garnish and rear bumper like I said.

Might change the design on one of the wheels.

Going to paint an Akria reference on the rear window

There's a lot to do still. But now I have a deadline so I might actually move my ass for once.

 

Thanks dude. And the lungs thing was years ago and at different times for each one. I had surgery to glue them to my chest which is the same surgery they used to give early astronauts for low atmosphere missions, so basically I could go to space if I wanted.

Funny you say that, because my next project is actually in the background, but it may or may not be the Stagea. We'll have to wait and see.