Life is a Highway

I haven't been around much lately, but I have been busy!  These are two of my latest customs, Mack and the King's hauler from Disney/Pixar's CARS.  I made the trucks themselves about a year ago, using CARS Mini-Adventure plastic toys and combining them with AFX and XT truck chassis,and had pix in my gallery here before the big (server) crash of 2011.  The trailers are new.

The trailers are based on AW Racing Rigs, but I ended up having to modify them just a bit.  Because of the large cartoon stacks on the trucks, I had to move the trailers back in order to enable the trucks to turn (which can be handy from time to time).  In order to make the trailers look "right," I had to extend the lower portion forward by about a quarter of an inch.  The decals are custom made by me, my first attempt at creatingmy own decals.  The artwork for the King hauler was found on a CARS diecast collector website and sized for the Mattel 155 deicast hauler trailer, which had to be resized to fir the AW trailer.  To make the Mack decals, I scanned the side of a Mattel diecast and edited and resized it to fit.  They were printed on MicroMark white decal film using an inkjet printer, and sprayed with Krylon clear-coat that MicroMark sells with the decal paper.  If I had to do it all over again, I might print the graphics out on labels as paper stickers.

To make the King trailer, I stripped the AW trailer and repainted it -- a chore in and of itself!  I don't know what kind of paint AW uses on these, but it was just about impervious to every paint stripping method known to styrene modelers.  I ended up soaking it in a vat of Simple Green in my ultrasonic cleaner for a couple of weeks, and eventually managed to scrape it all off with a teaspoonm, leaving minimal damage to the plastic underneath.  Then it was a quick coat of Tamiya primer/surfacer, a couple of coats of Petty blue, the decals, and a coat of clear.

Rather than strip the second trailer to make Mack, I simply sanded off the graphics, primed, and painted with red paint, then added the decals and clear coat.

For both trucks, I had to drill a new hole behind the cast-in 5th wheel to get the trailer to clear the big cartoon-y stacks.  Mack's trailer was still hitting, so I carefully removed the pin from the trailer chassis and repositioned it toward the front.

They run OK, but the extra length means that a 9" radius curve is about as tight as they can handle.  They're sitting on AW XT Ultra G chassis right now, but I may experiment with a wieght pan on my one non-MT AFX chassis to see if that helps them stay upright better.

All in all, it was a fun and educational little project, but I can't say I'd be too eager to try and repeat it!