GermanTA03Guy

removing the masking tape from the firewall to reveal the window was a similar feeling to removing the wrap of a lexan body. by now, the little sparco logos on the gloves have joined. This rally timer can be seen in a video:

I decided to recreate my old karting gloves from bitd. Sharing this I notice how deep down the rabbit hole I am right now. Does it have to do with all the brush cleaner ? THe original car has these silver mounts for the dashboard. I made helpful guidelines to place the dots. Things like These mounts or the wobbly dashboard look really funny on the race car and not even as straight as my scale model And those cars looked sketchy as badword in some places. Which I find really amusing. Rumors say that Lancia was once caught for having a rollcage made out of cardboard (to save weight) .... Walter Roehrls friends and family told him not to drive for Lancia because it crumbles apart in a crash. He said he was not planning to crash.

...stickers... i love stickers .... but dont overlook what I did to the rollcage/subframe joints and paint... i love paint... which one to choose ?

Gotta throw in some LEGO Also by now i have totally replaced the original cockpit front end. I hadnt planned to do that but getting the straight shapes meet the curvy cockpit form was challenging. Happy with how i could solve that. and a proportion check yup looking good ...

Hey guys thank you for all the nice comments, I´m overwhelmed But I am indeed also really satisfied with the project. So again, thankyou for the kind reception THe next step looks not soo spectacular but I can tell you, it cost me some sleepless nights to get the "construction" for the angles right, both in my head and in the plastics. These angled side parts that have to exactly meet the inside of the body, as well as having the right angle for the firewall with the window... .. but I made it successfully And always the test fitting... as the craftsmen say, better measure twice and cut once, than the other way round Now some eye candy with the painted engine block. THose revell emaille colors are so good and opaque. Their flow characteristics are great. I much prefer them to the tamiya XF paints. Which are much too big for my needs anyway. And they smell worse.

Thanks ! Just the 3d printing. The cnc milling of the plates was done by carbon-posten.de - also very good work for fair prices.

now the real cutting begins... not enough... mock up... and another crucial milestone done...

MOCK UP The old cockpit was my test mule.... with the thick layers of brush strokes on it, I didn´t have major issues cutting it up. by the way; the dashboard COULD NOT BE LEFT LIKE THAT. The original 037 dashboard looks totally different (angular) https://srtartblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/pictures_lancia_rally-037_1982_4.jpg more MOCK UPs

By the way, YES, the original is RWD. I thought about converting the model to RWD, too. Be it with a one way the other way round, so I have 2WD drive and 4WD braking, or just leaving the belt away. But from my experience with rallying RCs, this is not soo much fun and has nearly zero traction. SO I went with a torque splitter unit; Normally you have to have 30T for a TA03R /S in total, meaning 14T belt pinion in the back and 16T in the front , for a LITTLE rear bias. THe drifters back in the day also did 30T, but more extreme, 10T in the back and 20T in the front or so - you know what i mean; ANyway, with the chassis plate tolerances and maybe a slacky belt, I managed to comfortably fit 17T in the front and 14T in the back - meaning 31 total... SO it is even a little more close to a 2WD than with the normal torque splitter unit. We´ll see how it drives and if I go back to 16/14 with a new belt or what... we´ll see...

The (first) parts: And a shoutout to a really good partner in this project: I got the parts from KOLBASA Design+Prototyping, excellent service and conditions. Can only recommend ! https://www.design-prototype.de/ and this is what the mounting hole was for.... Too low though... gotta change... what about the exhaust ? .... Raised the gearbox with a spacer: For that, I had to cut/grind the rear gearbox in an unimportant area below the sabilizer mount: MUCH better now ! and protected in jumps and bottoming outs - by the CF plate.

Now on to something that REALLY COULD NOT BE LEFT LIKE THAT: The car is a pure-bred mid-engined racing car. YOU CANNOT look through the rear window and see a spare tire and belts ! I thought about using a Demi WOrks fake engine (4-cyl) - later I discovered exactly this has been done before on TC; First I thought this would fit into the "vacuum forming look" of the cockpit; but I ended up not using it anyway because the proportions were off. If anyone has a use for it, please pm me; just postage to the UK is not a good idea for me anymore sadly... SO I started mocking something up: A few hours later: ..and a exhaust and a gearbox when we´re printing something anyway... and i planned in a hole to mount the gearbox on the chassis plate...

What I especially like about the restoration by Andrea Chiavenuto in contrast to the old state of the car was the black window trim. So much more aesthetic in my eyes.

Sticker time pt. 1 ! .... For this build I chose something else: water transfer decals. They have nearly zero thickness and can be laquered over; as I´m painting the outside anyway, this seems convenient. ANd no dust will get under the sticker edges !

Lets start by restoring the body. The pre-owner hadnt painted it, but stickered it, so with the yellowing white plastic, it couldnt be left like that. THe helmets had been painted with some terrible stuff... I made some extra openings and closed the grill extra headlight mounts, because the look i wanted was without the additional light cluster. Also I think "inside black" is important... Oh and not to forget, I put another lip on the front...

Started by putting my Ta03 RS TRF-ish from a 911 GT2 under it - you can see the offsets are a topic. The body is quite narrow. Which is one part of the often toyish look. I don´t like tubs. So first things first, I designed a Ta03 RS Rally carbon deck. Less holes for less dust and some extra mounting holes for a possible later dust curtain. I like to put some special slots into my battery holders, so I can fix the speedo cables with some velcro ribbon, going in the right direction of the cables: Here you can see a variety in battery mounting positions for setup later