TOPIC:

Hi all,

this is my Striker restoration topic.

I found this car in the trash bin in the model shop where I did work some years ago. So I decided to resque it because a Tamiya is always a Tamiya.
The car was in really bad shape with all black and blue plastic parts sprayed and dirty, the rear wing missing and the tires rotten.
But the worse thing was the chassis, broken in the front end, and the top body cover all covered with epoxy resin. Don't ask why there were 2 mm of hard yellow resin on the body, I don't know.

So I decided to restore it. The first thing has been stripe it and all plastic parts has been replaced. I had a full box of Striker/Sonic fighter spare parts in my store.
The hard part of the job was the body chassis. So, to be quick, I somehow restored the parts and painted them. The car was painted white as per manual and the driver suit red. Then the car has stored again for some time.

This summer I decided to continue and finish the job with decals and so on and with my horror I've seen that my previous restoration was not so good.
There were many imperfections on the car. The two shells didn't match cause they were chemically deformed by the resin and consupted by my sanding job.
The paintjob was not near to perfection and the paint had problems. Also the powder did stick on the paint and it was impossible to clean it away.
At the end all top body shell was heavy ruined by the resin and my resto job, the surface of the bonnet and the driver cockpit was not flat.
So I decided to redo the resto job again.

This topic is the diary of this hard job.

Here's the Striker after 1st resto job. It seems good but...

Hi Kontemax,

Strikers are definitively not my favorite Tamiya car, but as i can see there you've done a great job.
Anyway, pictures from the before and after would be nice to see

Manotas

Nice to see a thread for this I must admit the Fox/Wild One wheels look good on the Striker Looking forward to the rest of the re-re-build

Kontemax wrote:

... I've seen that my previous restoration was not so good. ...

I know exactly what you mean - but I think it's almost inevitable, as skills increase, so do standards; I look back at some of the work I did on RC cars a few years ago & know I would do better now.

For instance, my 1st Wild Willy M38 LWB: it was meant to be a quick tidy up as at the time I thought it was too far gone for a proper restoration... Since then I've done far better on far worse cars, I looked at it recently & thought "I don't remember doing this so badly"

Even a little over two years ago I evidently found it "acceptable" to do the plaid shirt on a Sand Rover Driver in flat red with a sharpies for the details

A fun car mixed from divers others but always nice to have.

The before pictures don't exist and the pictures you see here are the 1st restoration step so in some way they are the before the final resto.

Max

Manotas wrote:

Hi Kontemax,

Anyway, pictures from the before and after would be nice to see

Manotas

As I said yesterday, the Striker seems good but there were several problems on it.

The two shells didn't match as you can see in these pictures.

The paint quickly become dirty with all this dust impossible to clean.

The bonnet was far to be flat. This problem was due the epoxy resin the previous owner applied to the car. Probably the ABS was slightly melted by some sort of chemical reaction.

Other dust, you can see it better probably. I also never liked the protrusion near the right driver arm.

You can also see the cockpit plate is very far to be flat. You can see the signs due the job to remove the resin.

Another damage was the rounded corners due the excessive sanding action to remove the resin.

The chassis was broken in several point. You can see the button place broken.
This car needed more attention in my opinion so these are the reason I decided to re-restore it again.

Max

You have here a very nicecar

Not enough nice


Max

stingray-63 wrote:

You have here a very nicecar