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The Christmas project starts now.
So I picked this up on an American site, it would have been cheap if it wasn’t for the postal costs. But it looked original and apart from the missing winch on the front of the body it looked complete.
I’ve got a winch in a spares box and if I can’t find that you can buy a full sprue for about £10.

The tear down begins.
Initial observations, it’s in really good condition. It’s not been messed about with and has clearly been built and used kindly.
Worst points I would say are definitely the wheels and tyres, I’m gutted the gentleman in Hong Kong has stopped making his repro tyres. I bought a set for my Blazing Blazer and the quality is brilliant.
Main issues with the chassis is breaking the seal created by locktite. I’ve got down to a couple of screws on the chassis and the rear trailing arms, so I’m just going to be patient with them, they’ll give in eventually.
It’s nice to find at least one bearing in the gear box. The remaining brass ones will all be replaced.
Everything is really grubby and dirty, but I like doing the clean up and I this will scrub up well.
Even looking on the bottom of the tub chassis there aren’t too many gouges.
I’m impressed at how tight the radio gear packs in, it just about all fits, very neatly.
Oh yeah final point, this is the LWB version.

Nice Al. And with sanwa period radio gears.

Here’s the body in pieces. Very little glue was used by the PO, except for glueing the spare tyre to the rear panel.
 It hasn’t been painted apart from the reflectors and head lights so it will hopefully be minimal use of the graffiti remover !!!!

That's the first time I look into pictures of the Wild Willy... It's clear that Super Willy (yes, there was a Super Willy sticker for the spare rear wheel with the original 6V Super Wheelie Land Cruiser from 1983) had been slightly inspired from the Wild Willy. However, the Marui team did it smartly: with the 2 possibles positions of the battery pack they allowed a more polyvalent usage.


And for the bodyshell, this WIld Willy is a classic. should be easier to model actually (it's simpler than the Marui ones)... 

In anycase, very nice project, Al

Excited to see how yours comes up I have one with a bit more paint on it but similar condition, have a few waiting to bring back to nice. Thanks i've been sleeping for too long 

At the weekend I managed to get the final few bits apart and today I started cleaning everything. All of the fasteners are in some WD40. They are actually pretty clean, but it can’t hurt. Degreaser and washing up liquid were the order of the day for everything else.

I can't wait to see the final result.

 
So this weekend I decided I needed to have a bit of time out, so I pulled out the Wild Willy and started going through the parts to give everything a polish and second clean.
 
I used the Novus polish on the plastic parts.
The piece on the left is just washed. The piece on the right has been polished.
And it really has added a bit of shine back to these parts.

 
If you look back at some of the earlier pictures, the main chassis pieces had some paint over spray on them. I used some wet and dry to sand this back and again went over with the Novus plastic polish. And it’s come up pretty well. I’ve started the build up so hopefully an update on this later in the week. 
   
Final thing today, was tidying up the MSC wiring. I don’t know what was going on with the original, but I soldered in a new connector.

Really nice result with novus Al. Congrats.