| description | The basis of this car is a Tamiya FF chassis (intended for a Mondeo bodyshell) that I bought on eBay. After a thorough strip & clean, I rebuilt it with new Acoms Techniplus radio gear, speed control resistor, ballraces, replaced the missing battery clip, body R-clips & aerial tube, and fitted a slightly used 19-turn motor. The new 1/12th scale Mondeo shell I bought (in the very marginal hope it would match up) didn't fit, so it's now shelled with a Kamtec mk1 Escort body.
Being a 'universal' vacformed item, the body needed quite a lot of fettling - trimming the sides, cutting out the wheelarches, and drilling the body mount holes to start with, then dremmelling out the windows and reheating the sides to bend them to more plausible angles. The card test 'stickers' were made by scanning the shell, and fiddling about in Paint Shop Pro for the best part of the day. These were then printed out high quality on self adhesive film for the finished bodywork, which was sprayed with Tamiya 'Park Green'. The internal deck was made from 2mm styrene, and the driver figure came from a Tamiya Bigwig.
The wheels and tyres that came with the chassis were very poor, so were replaced with a set of Shumacher touring car wheels & 'yellow spot' (medium compound) tyres.
I've fitted LED lighting - 4x 5mm 400 mCd red LED tailights, I've cut these down so they don't look too bulbous, and painted everything except the ends; and the front end I've used 4x 10mm 11,000+ mCd hyperbright white LEDs, these are fitted in grommets in holes I cut through the bodywork, the portions inside the bodywork have been painted to minimise light transmission. I used JST connectors (the same as used in BEC wiring) to tap into the power supply between the MSC and the radio reciever, and a Tamiya battery connector between the chassis wiring and that of the bodywork, so I can completely remove the bodywork when needed.
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Great escort body,and a nice car.