TOPIC:

As some of you may recall from the "mailman" topic, I have recently acquired a vintage 58059 Porsche 959. I have no experience doing restorations so I thought I'd ask some questions of the professionals here.

The chassis is in good working order but a couple of parts are cracked and have been repaired including a lower front arm and a rear shock support. I was able to find a (very expensive) C parts tree which contains new versions of both cracked parts so I'll be replacing them. The original MSC and Technigold motor work great, as does the Futaba BEC receiver and original Attack radio. I'll be tearing the whole thing down to the bones, cleaning, and rebuilding from scratch.

I have an original body shell but it is in tough shape with a few cracks and holes. It will go into storage and get replaced. I don't have the driver figures. My plan is to go with a TBG repro shell, but I'm not sure what to do about the drivers and wing. TBG has a Lexan wing. Is it any good? How bad does it look compared to the stock molded wing? TBG also has Lexan drivers but they have no heads. Is there an aftermarket source for heads or something close? How about the light buckets? The H parts and K parts appear to be unobtainable. From what I can tell, getting an original shell with drivers is in the $400 range and even then a brand new blow molded shell could have holes in it or be to too fragile to use. I plan to actually run this model (very carefully).

The best is find original spares but for the body, tbg is a good choice. I don't know about the wing. The original is abs like heads and upper lights. For the heads I don't remind me but you can buy grasshopper pilot heads. Light buckets good luck. Goldfish found lots of spares.

The Grasshopper driver head is far too big for the 959 as the Grasshopper is 1:10 and the 959 1:12.

Me neither have seen heads for these, and I need them both for my Celica and the 959...
Bothers me that when I traded away my Celica Gr.B it had a full cockpit with drivers, when I bought it back several years later, both the body and cockpit had gone missing.

But Blakbird, I found that the Tamiya 14122 Racing Rider Pilot Figures Kit 1/12 has the same era style helmets.
A bit expensive for two heads tho..

Another possible solution is to use the Tamtec GT-01 driver head if you can find that part tree.

The Celica/ 959 were another one of those models Tamiya made, sort of like the Avante... an engineering marvel to be sure... but so over complicated you can't believe someone would build it......... but you are glad they did . However these cars are very fragile and have way to much power with the technigold, a dangerous combination .

Yes I love them !

As you have found out they are very hard to find good parts for and really expensive when you do hmmm .
The 959 body from TBG is very good, the Celica is also good but he did need to make a bit of a compromise on the rear bumper area for moulding reasons. Apparently Tamiya was blow moulding these bodies into female moulds, great for details but did not make the best bodies and they suffered from thin spots and other flaws so they stopped making them that way. They also break easy. But you need to give Tamiya credit for trying and they are beautiful to see. As for the wing, I have never ordered one but based on everything else I have from TBG it should be a workable part.
The interior is good, moulded from an original but you can also get the Tamiya Rally car interior set # 54491 for the heads. Only problem is the Porsche is 1/12 scale and the others are 1/10 so they might look a bit Wild Willy-ish if that's OK. The tamtech driver is a good option but the wrong helmet or perhaps the xr311 driver tree as that has open face helmets or most of the early 1/12 F-1 models had driver figures with helmets if you can find the trees.
Just my 2 cents, good luck....