Back to its best My First RC some 25 yrs on :)

When I woke up today I decided to do some more RC repaints. Now during the morning & early afternoon I repainted my Traxxas Sledge Hammer and did not finish that until gone 2pm now I still had time to spare so decided to have a crack at another RC repaint, now my Kyosho Pegasus was the first ever RC car that I ever bought, I got it brand new from Moores Handicrafts in Rugby (when I used to live over there) I had paid for it using a revolver account where by I used to take in a couple of quid every Saturday (My pocket money) and paid it off bit by bit over a number of months, this car was reduced from £49.99 to £44.99 due to the fact that the kit was missing its Build instructions, and as it was less to buy than the cheapest Tamiya car in the shop (The Grasshopper was actually more than this) I decided to buy it, when I finally got it I only had the kit and could not afford the radio gear to make it work but I built the car without instructions and later ordered a manual for it and when I checked it up I found that I’d only left a couple of washers out of the rear gearbox outdrives and assembled the rest of the car correctly, anyway that was some 25 years ago now? I’m not 100% sure of the date I purchased this car but I think it was sometime in late spring 1986 late April early May time ish, anyway it being now 2011 I make that some 25 years since I bought this car, now in its early life it had a bit of a hard time by me, I broke numerous bits on it, it has a number design faults that I discovered while using it I later repainted the original body in a ugly black & silver scheme before I gave up of playing with RC cars and packed the car away in the attic with the other Car I had at the time (Mardave Meteor & Kyosho Optima Pro)

When I got into RC car collecting in the early 2000’s I wanted to restore my Pegasus back to its former glory and set about acquiring numerous spares and but as these were hard to find at the time I ended up buying complete cars instead, as time went on I went a bit mad collecting Pegasus cars, I got a Icarus and Cosmo too and at its hight I had no less than 5 Pegasus cars, but later on I decided to scale down on all the multiple cars that I had and the spare pegs had to go, unfortunately when I sold them off I got a fraction of what I paid for them even though the cars I sold where in better condition then when I bought them, this disappointed me greatly but then the Pegasus has never really been seen as a desirable collectors car, so now I have a huge box full of spares for Pegasus series cars and in it was a new body set, this car I had fitted the body off one of the other cars I’d bought but as I’d sold that one off I had 3 spare bodies and this new one, so I decided to fit the new one, but I never got around to painting it so it was left until now for me to do something about.

With this body I decided to go old school and paint it using brush paints, I could have sprayed it and I have fresh tins of white spray paint but to be honest I can’t be arsed to do all the masking up, it’s a pain in the back side so I preferred to paint this body with Tamiya PC brush paint, by doing it this way I would not need to do any masking but the downside is the finish would not be so uniform and to get a good solid cover without brush strokes I would need to apply at least three coats of this paint, so I set about my work, first task was to paint the roof bars in black these are the semi exposed tubular bars that form the main corners of the roof section, I marked out the lines of the windows and roof bars with blue marker pen then set about painting in the roof bars, after they were done I had the driver figure to look at, this car comes with a lexan driver figure that is screwed to the roof of the cockpit inside the car and can be viewed through the windows, on the box art the driver has a red helmet with a back visor, blue race suit, black safety harness and black steering wheel that they are holding, the backrest and surround for the figure are also black, using the marker pen I drew out the lines for the various areas of the driver figure then started off by painting on the black sections.

By now it was time to start painting on the white beginning with the rear wing, after carefully cutting off the excess I began with pushing paint into the corners of the side plates first, I’ve had problems with paint not getting into this tight areas before especially when spraying so I made sure the I was getting paint into where it should go this time around, after that I painted the rest of the wing, the first layer of paint is quite thin and the brush strokes evident but after it has dried I could apply the second coat, but first onto the main shell, this was painted in a peace meal approach, starting around the window frames and working outwards, following the lines of the moulding until the painting was complete, this was the first of three coats that would be applied over the proceeding 2 hrs during which time the driver figure was fleshed out with the red & the blue areas of Helmet & race suit that two had at least two coats, when the final coats had dried off it was time to begin decal application.

Now with all the cars I’ve been painting recently I’ve been doing then to Box art spec, and this is no exception, as with most Kyosho Cars the decals you get don’t quite give you all that you need, though this car is one of the better ones, as well as the box I have a Japanese promotional flyer for the car which has a number of colour pictures of the car but in these they show a slightly different decal arrangement, the cover of the manual too shows an alternative scheme. But I’ve stuck to my guns on this one and done as per the box top, I began by applying the coloured stripes and decided to start off with the large oval decal that goes on the rear wing, now this decal can be applied 180 degrees out and I was not sure which way to put it, the Box top showed one way yet the manual instructions showed another? Again I went for the box art look and with that I continued onward, most of the decals were OK but you only get two sets of the small “KYOSHO RACING TEAM” logos and the box art really needs three sets, so I used up the two that I had one when on the front and the other on the Left had rear wing side fence, the other wing side fence I’ve left blank even though there are spare decals in the set that I could put there?

With the decals done all that was left to do was to fit the various body parts together, the driver figure was bolted on first with a screw through the top of the helmet, then I fitted the head lamps, these are grey mouldings that screw to the sides of the cockpit just in front of the side windows, as the paint was still soft I damaged it a little in screwing the lamp screws in, so instead of getting the paint out again to touch up I used some tippex to touch in and it works a treat, the rear wing was last to go, I had pre-drilled the screw holes but in order to hold the plastic nut I had to use a Tamiya box spanner and that was as tight fit inside the rear wing risers as I was bolting up the paint got damaged again so it was out with the tippex once more, when all was done the body looks beautiful, I applied it to the chassis and the model is once again complete, over the years I’ve replaced many of the parts on this car and there isn’t much of it left that’s original but its still my first RC and will always be one of my favourites :)