DucCutters: Elefant Racer (Bill Johnson)

DucCutters Custom Italian Motorcycles

Elefant Racer (1:16 Scale)
Project By: Bill Johnson (azbill@duccutters.com)
Web Site: www.DucCutters.com/azbill

This project started in the summer of 2011 when I was making plans to have spinal surgery. My friend Ric Murphy owns a model truck company, Garden Trucking, and we where talk one day about which is harder to customize motorcycle or scale models. So he gave me one of his older display trucks to customize while I was recovering from the surgery.

The truck started out as a MAN delivery truck. The truck was upgraded to 6 x 6 radio controlled drive, and covered in Dakar rally stickers.

Body (Trailer): The first thing that had to be changed was body portion of the truck. the simple box body wasn't ever the right size. After taking several measurements, twice and studying photos of past and current rally trucks and drawling of possible future design for rally tucks I set to work. I first drew the body to scale in Adobe Ilustrator as a pattern and printed it out on card stock. Once I liked the end result I transfered the pattern to foam-board and built a full size foam-board model. After the third or fouth try out on foam-board I tranffered the pattern on to sheets of balsa wood and hand cut them out. I assembled the balsa wood pieces togetther using small spots of hot glue. Once the unit was all together I soaked every seam inside and out with Gorilla glue and let it dry to three days. I then used my Dremel to round all the outside edged to about 1/8" dia. Next, I coated all the edges in wood filler, then after it dryed I hand sanded the body down nice and smooth. I finals spray painted the body dark blue.

Cab: The original cab interior was pretty lame. I thought about replacing it with the interior of a model Ferrari, but I haven't been able to source anything to scale yet. For now I just blacked out the windows and painted the cab dark blue to match the body. I got to sets of chrome roof mounted light bars for the cab. I had to slightly modified them to get them to fit, but got them wired and mounted. I conectted the light to a Duel E Switch which left me one control free, so I decided to add blue ground effect lighting. I got some pre-made 12v blue LED blocks at the local auto parts store and mounted them on the bottom of the frame.

Chassy: The truck came with the Wedico Pro Chassis so all I really need to do was to upgraded to a high torque motor 12v to give me the maximum power possible.

The Look: To give the final Dakar Rally truck touch, I drew up some special artwork and a gathered a collection of sponsorship logos and had them printed and die cut on vinyl. The trucks main artwork matched that of the artwork from my Bull Elefant race bike project. The sponsorship logos are just my dream team of supports I'd like to have. I painted the cab and body dark blue at first. I didn't like the fact that you could see all my mistakes in the wood and metal, so I wrapped both in blue tinted carbon-fiber before adding the decals.

The final touches was taking a sheet of aluminum and creating a full under body skip plate for the cab and take some 1/4" dia. copper rod and creating an exoskeleton roll cage for the cab.

Elefant Racer

01/15/12 - The Start

02/20/12 - Foam body

Layout (PDF)

03/02/12 - Wood body

03/22/12 - body Paint

03/30/12 - Wiring Lights

1:16 Scale Pizza

04/06/12 - Carbon-Fiber Wrap, Tinted Windows

04/09/12 - Smoke system (Smoke tips)

04/21/12 - Decal and Light Test

Running Lights
Running & Bar Lights

Running & Ground Lights
Running, Bar & Ground Lights
Rear Break Lights

04/24/12 - Skid Plate

PDF

Seems I need new tools...

05/05/12 - Sound System

Speaker Grill

42" Scale Speaker!

Top center: Volume Control

05/06/12 - Assembly and Full System Test

Wipe Antenna