# Impounded Cars



## Alien (Sep 5, 2001)

I took a break from my Moebius Jupiter 2 build and tried Cars instead.

OK, I cheated a bit and used die cast cars in this diorama. 
But there are no kits available for these subjects. That is my excuse! Get over it.

I am a big fan of the Disney/Pixar Cars movies and I collect the Mattel 1:55 scale die casts. Apparantly I have too many of them. Hmmm!
But these are not them. (That previous sentence was a complete waste of your time.)
These are the bigger (1/43 ish) scale die casts made for Disney Stores and Disney parks.
This group of Boy Racers (Commonly referred to as 'Tuners') had batteries, switches and LEDs in them to simulate their underside neon lighting. Cool idea.

I wanted to build a diorama depicting the end of the first movie where the Tuners were arrested for speeding and sent to the impound yard.

I decided to remove the switches and resistor from the cars and build and program a micro-controller circuit to drive the LEDs in all four cars to have them fade, flash and chase for the diorama.

This is DJ ready to have his switches and resistor removed. He was big enough to house my little circuit board. (It currently does not have the PIC micro-controller plugged in to its socket. For those who noticed!) I glued in an aluminium tube to allow wires to feed down into the base and also to fix him to the base. I did this to the other three cars too.









Junk, junk and more junk.
I needed some tires to scatter around so I thought I would go to a toy shop and find a model car with tires I could use to take a silicon rubber mold of.
All the cars I could find did not have a realistic looking tread. Doh! 
But I found a 1/43rd Back to the Furure Delorean in my collection and it had great tires. So all the tires in the diorama are cast from Goodyear Delorean tires... Styly!
I made a 44 gallon drum from Evergreen tube with some half round glued around it to emulate the bulges. Three syles of mufflers were made and silicon rubber molds made from them and the drum.
Let the casting commence...
Multiple copies were made with polyester casting resin.
Bent brass rod was then added to the mufflers as the pipes. 
A few more bits of junk were constructed. Old drive shafts, wheel hubs, a wooden pallet, a road cone, shock absorbers and a differential axle.

Now I had to go and visit a Fabric store. I am certainly not a 'material guy' (Small Madonna joke.. Pauses for reaction...... Nothing!)
I bought 'Tulle', commonly used for veils on wedding dresses, to use for the chain link fence.
The fence was held up by 2mm Evergreen rods that I glued some smaller bent brass rod into the ends to enable soldering of the razor wire.
Razor wire was made by twisting two thin lengths copper wire together with a cordless drill.

So now a lot of airbrushing started. And after painting all that junk my airbrush skills are certainly not rusty! (Another wee joke...... Still nothing! Sigh!)

The Municipal Impound sign was printed on paper using PhotoShop with a suitably woody background for the text. Real wood was used for the rear of the sign and the posts.

I made four parking boots/clamps for the cars. One size did NOT fit all. Darn it!

The base is just MDF sheet with some wooden molding glued around it. The wood molding is Rimu. Try getting that where you live! (Native New Zealand timber. World famous in New Zealand!)
To finish it off, I used peel and stick felt sheet on the bottom of the base. This stuff is great for the under side of model bases. No gluing required!

Well that is it. Here are the results.
Starring: Snot Rod, DJ, Wingo, and Boost.

















*Let there be light.*









Alien


----------



## Milton Fox Racing (May 27, 2014)

:thumbsup:


----------

