TOPIC:

This stated out as an experiment and also an opportunity to practice my modelling skills.
I'll  post up the build properly, but I just wanted to stick this down as a place holder.

The Sand Rover body should never have had those hole hacked out of it. So I bought a re-release body to see if it was possible to fill them all back in and return one of my favourite Tamiya shells back to how it should be.

This has been in some ways a long project. I started on the body a couple of years ago and I was happy to leave it in a box.
During this time I'd been gathering a lot of Sand Rover / Holiday Buggy parts together for some restorations.
Now that I have 2 Sand Rovers and 1 Holiday Buggy mid resto, I'd been looking at moving on some of the spares.
The chassis under this was in an unwanted sale. Well half of its potentially sold ( body, wheels and tyres ).
So having a chassis and all the bits just sitting there I put it together on Saturday.
On Sunday I dug out the body, which was closer to being finished than I remember. And it's all held together very well.
So tonight I stuck some wheels on and sat the body in situ.
Im waiting for a reamer to drill out the holes on the body. But I'm keen to push this on and see how close it looks when finished to the original.
Thanks.

So my phone is telling me this started in January 2018 !!!So after having bought the shell for just over £20. I used an original shell to measure from and to be my template. 

Here's the re-release next to an original, so we can see what we're trying to create.

Nice project. I love the sand rover

The front was relatively simple. I cut out some squares of styrene sheet, put them underneath the holes and made a line with a scalpel.
Cut out the pieces and used 2 part epoxy to glue in place. Once dry I ran some filler over the top to fill any small gaps and then finally sanded this back.

Once I'd measured and cut off the extra piece above the motor, again I was able to put a piece of styrene in place and draw the shape I needed to fill in the end of the motor cover section.

I kept placing the 2 shells together so I could judge if it was looking alright.

So with the extra floor and the motor part squared off.

Oh, another Sand Rover! What's your plan? What chassi will you be using for it?

I can't go to work tomorrow.

Looking good

Tom, it's going onto the correct chassis.

I don't know why I was trying to sell this chassis. It's at home with this body on it.
I had to fix one of the shock mounts and I'll see about fixing the front body mounting point.
I'd cleaned all the parts up to sell, so this was a nice easy build. 

So the body got this far, at this point I was worried how I would fill in the final gap.
This is where after a bit of head scratching and considering trying to heat up styrene and curve it was what I thought I'd need to do. I tried the off cut that had been over the motor.
But I guess obviously due to the curve being the same, it fitted perfectly. So the back end was getting close.
 
And here's how it's looking underneath.

So the extra bits I'd replaced and all the fiddling meant I needed to start tidying it up. I've started adding in some filler and I've been gradually tidying it up.
To bring this up to date, at the weekend I finally decided to work out cutting the holes for the rear body mounts.
I used some clear acetate to make a template  from the original body. I marked the bottom of the re-re and marked were to drill.
Im now waiting for my reamer to drill the correct diameter.