TOPIC:

Dude! That darker red is gorgeous! Nice work!!!

I was very lucky with it. Warm temps but the paint was good. And I'll keep it like that. The first plan was to order a mci decals sheet. It's not perfect but scale like I like.

Looks a bit better in slightly better light with Clear on, but still not as cherry as stingrays

 

Woohaaaoooo. It's awesome. And largely better than mine. Shiny and no orange peel. It is too nice.

Forgot the rear window, so I have masked that up & have primed, painted & cleared between the rain showers. I really dislike panels that are constructed like that, the texture is wrong when you paint on clear plastic and it never comes out quite the same, no matter what you do in prep and paint. the Subaru Brat glass/roof and F-150 Ranger/Blackfoot cab rear are just the same & it just seems so unnecessary to do it that way

The chassis went together much better than the first HG P407 I built, with none of the problems of overly short screws, nylocs that disintegrated, bent parts and so on - although I did run out of fasteners earlier than I would have liked - but setting up the gearchange was a real pig. 

It worked fine by hand, or using a servo tester, but with radio control, installed as per the manual, the best I could get was 1st (4WD) and 2nd (low speed RWD). Moving the servo over, using modified Tamiya rod ends to make the shift linkage as short as possible & setting the end points on the TX to 120% both ways gave me 1st & 3rd (high speed RWD), but servo neutral does not correspond to 2nd gear, it's slightly off.  

I think the problem is that the gearshift rod in the gearbox is incredibly sloppy, it's possible the shift fork hasn't been built correctly, but mostly it appears that the holes in the gearbox casting the rod moves in are oversize. Drilling them out & sleeving them is a possibility, but TBH it seems like an awful lot of work, with the distinct possibility of trashing the gearbox, so I don't know if I'll revisit it, unless it breaks completely. For the moment, I can live with a slightly asymmetric transmitter shift gate

Fantastic color choice!

During the shutdown, I bought both the re-re Bruiser and the HG P407. I really enjoyed building the re-re and the P407 was prebuilt. I took the P407 body, painted it red and added the Mountaineer rollbar. I stripped all the chrome bits too and added some RC4WD decals. So, it looks more like a proper Toyota from the early 80s. BUT, the most irritating thing about the P407 was the amount of slop. Steering, shifting, suspension-ing, etc. I left the steering stock, but used the now impossible to find aluminum upgrade from Hot Racing. That made a big difference. Still sloppy but not as bad. Also, the shifting...It just could not find center. I blamed it on the servo saver. I replaced both with Tamiya units. Also, the leaf springs were all different shapes and the u-bolts didn't sit flat. Again, replaced with Tamiya parts. The shocks...yeah, I just threw those away. I tried the double seal, still garbage. I eventually replaced them with some random shock from Amazon and installed some rc4wd shock towers.

Paint for the drivers is done, if a bit predictable ...

Wahoooo awesome jonny.

I don't know how obvious it is, but I didn't manage to get the paint fully into the corners of the bed of the blue HG P407 body ...




... I cheated & just masked the sides a lot higher than for the red one:




Some airbrushed Tamiya XF-85 Rubber Black later: 

I may still add some LEDs & it needs a test drive, but the blue HGP407 is basically done ... I know I wanted a result a bit more subtle than a straight up Bruiser clone, but I did wonder if I'd gone a bit too far towards "anonymous" - but if it was 1:1, something with that degree of lift, with that diameter of tyres, with stripes and big logos would be pretty noticeable

I've bought another set of the metal badges - these are evidently pre-painted now, and appear to have double sided tape already on them? There's no reason why I can't put the red one together too