TOPIC:

Would be great to know what everyone's dream or favourite restoration project is.

Mine is of course the Porsche 959, and I'd also love to get my hands on a 'Black' Porsche.

What's yours?

How to make a choice really?
The two Porsches you mentioned would be every vintage fan's dream...
Besides those, I'd love to restore an Avante, Egress, Top Force Evo and/or TA02 Taisan.
I could probably come up with many more though.

Rough Rider, Willy and Hotshot to name a few more...

Willy, B2B, Blackfoot and Kyosho baja bug for starters.

Would be Super Champ for me. Always wanted one as a kid.
Otherwise, my Sand Scorcher.
Or maybe Gold Pan RC10.

I found the Cheetah restore thread on here very interesting, so would be keen to find out how accessible spares, especially the body shell would be.

I've found there's very little you can do to restore a lexan body, and I find getting the gouges out of plastic chassis components very tedious, so the cars I like restoring best have had hard (ABS/Styrene) bodies, and predominantly metal (or GRP) chassis' - SRBs, Cheetah/XR311, etc ...

Cars still on my wish list:

Ones I really want:
Super Champ
Willy's Wheeler

Ones I'm more likely to get:
Blackfoot
Falcon


One's I'd theoretically like to have:
Boomerang
Lancia Rally
Opel Ascona 400 Rally
Audi Quattro
Ford F150 Ranger
Toyota 4X4 pickup (3 speed)
Rough Rider
Avante

Porsche959Boy wrote:

I found the Cheetah restore thread on here very interesting, so would be keen to find out how accessible spares, especially the body shell would be.

Cheetah body sets do come up occasionally ... I think you'd be looking at 300 GBP or so

Spares availability - there really isn't any. You might find some has broken up a re-re-re XR311 for spares, but a lot of the parts have been "improved" so are not the same - the torsion bars in particular (which are laughably fragile) are not the same

Realistically, the only way to restore these is to buy extra cars as spares - I think I bought a total of 2 XR311's and 4 Cheetah's in various states of repair, out of that I built a pretty good & functional XR311 (although I did have to make all the lights, bumper parts, seats & other greeblies myself), a functional Cheetah - the snot green one - (with a heavily modified body), and another cheetah (the red one) with "show" suspension (i.e. the torsion bars are there, but not doing anything) with a heavily modified body (with more homemade greeblies). There were a few bits left over, these have gone to eddrick on here, so may help to resurrect another car.

I'm not trying to put you off - the XR311 was Tamiya's first off roader, and really quite ambitious for the time, even if it ended up being really fragile - and they seem to be getting increasingly popular, if the rising prices are anything to go by. The Cheetah is the same car underneath, just 10mm shorter.

You also need to be aware that the fasteners are not all metric - a lot of the screws described as "3mm" in the manual are in fact no.4 / 40tpi UNC threads ... I did make a list somewhere, if you get a cheetah or XR311 I'll dig it out to save you a bit of headscratching.

XR311 here if you are willing to sell a kidney, or firstborn child
(Ebay widget didn't work)

Jonny wrote:

Realistically, the only way to restore these is to buy extra cars as spares...

Yeah have that problem when it comes to my Willy M38's, but each time I find a 'bad one' I think this one will be 'just' for spares, then when it arrives I think oh he aint in such a bad shape maybe I can get some spares to fix this one to.



my other dream car is my vintage Bruiser.