the answer is: Marui Hunter (resto)

[Lonestar]

As I'm waiting for the last bits to complete my jrx pro SE, I tackled another car that had been waiting litterally for years on the shelves...

Can you guess what it is?

Paul

[duckhead]

Can you guess what it is?

KC Daylighter lamp from a Tamiya Rough Rider?

->Mark

[TRX-1-3]

No.

[Lonestar]

It's a reasonable guess... But this is the wrong answer

There's a big hint somewhere else on this very page...

Keep playing folks!

Paul

[Dadio]

Tamiya Holiday Buggy ?

[XLR8]

Is it a Lunch box? Did that model come with Daylighters?

[romulus22]

Beach buggy/sand rover?

[Lonestar]

That's the hint I was talking about

OtherMakes.JPG (14.51 KiB) Viewed 1531 times

OtherMakes.JPG (14.51 KiB) Viewed 1531 times

[R Cane]

Frog?
ribbit ribbit

[Dadio]

I guess its not Tamiya as its in the other makes section so we are looking for a smaller brand with spot lights , maybe one of those Grass Hopper or Hot Shot clones ?

[1300GT]

Marui Hunter?

[Lonestar]

1300GT is the winner!

15 years ago probably I bought a poor, used Hunter on ebay - these were not that common on the used market if only because they weren't that reliable to start with... At least not as robust as a Frog or even an SRB for instance. One can find NIB's (for a lot of dough...) but runners were and still are a lot less common. I had always liked the Hunter because it was on the first RC Car review I ever read, possibly in the firrst Auto-RCM (french mag) I bought as a teen back in the days. I had already bagged in a NiB one earlier as I blew my first paychecks on vintage RC stuff... But in my plans, this was going to be runner

Obviously, when I got the car, i realized why there weren't that many runners left many parts were broken, threads were stripped, and the chassis had the dreaded "broken cantilever mount" at the rear. This is a very common issue with these cars, and a blatant design flow, especially when the stock shock setup was so riduculously stiff. I painfully cleaned up the gunked-up car, reglued some parts, bought some others, and eventually ended up sourcing a new chassis! reassembled the car around it, left it on the shelf overnight, only to find out that the brand spanking new one had broken exactly at the same spot as the old one There was a tiny speck of black ABS near it on the shelf... I picked it up, saved the plastic bit somewhere and parked the car onthe "lemons" shelf...

... till I picked it back up a few days ago, given the early 2020 context

(TBC'ed)

[Coelacanth]

Nice, I'll look forward to your resto. After restoring my brother's Galaxy and currently working on a Shogun, the Marui cars indeed each all had major design flaws and bad weak links, they were all quite fragile. They were really good runners though, until they inevitably broke.

[Lonestar]

First I had to fix that chassis... As I understood i would never run this anyway (too fragile...) I just ca'ed it. It'll never hold under load, but the car will rest on a stand on the shelf I think





I also realized that I had fixed a lot of tiny bits here and there bitd, too... there are so many chunks of plastics that are so underdimensioned on this car, just at the wrong spots... the "Battery Box" ears, the rear bumper, for instance.

Mechanic internals were now "sound". Time to move the the body... I had bougth this expensive piece of plastic moons ago, but never came up to opening it. Lately, a lot of stuff has changed in my life, so I figured out, what the heck, yannnow Time to crack it open!



no external masking... this was the first thing to do.

[Lonestar]

Then I wanted to do box-art-like, but with a bit of a darker orange to match the "hunters" sticker on the wing

I am not much of a painter tbh, I can only do one paint job, which I'm using for all my racecars and is becoming a bit old after a while. Which is good because the Hunter box-art is desperately simple Anyways, this time I used this little gadget which makes the rattle-can job much, much easier. Warmly recommended!



in the end, it looks like this before stickies and with some of the appendixes (Lights, wings..) fixed on the body:



the body is fixed to the chassis, hooked to the white rollbar thingy with this grey hook thing - where you can see some old red paint from the previous owner (who was in a hurry it seems!)



and when hooked on to the lexan via other screws: