san1

Hi all, I am new to posting in this forum, although I have been reading for a while. I decided to post here as few months ago I bought a Losi Micro Rally with the intention of converting it into a pancar style car using the stock chassis (so not quite a pancar). During the last week I put my first body and wheels together so I thought I post the results here. Actually I first did this in the dedicated microtforum, so I will be repeating myself here, but there you go. I started with making my own simple vacuum former for which there are plenty of instructions on the net. At the same time I measured the Micro Rally chassis as best as I can to make sure my body would fit well. After that I started designing the body itself deciding on a closed top version for ease of manufacture and to make sure I can fit everything inside. It was also clear that I would need to make my own wheels and tyres as I couldn’t find anything readily available in the sizes I needed. So I designed the wheels in aluminium (which a friend of mine made for me) while for the tyres I decided on a simple solid shape made in either polyurethane rubber or polyurethane foam (I hope to start playing with the foam later this week) using one and the same moulds (material for the tyres is also readily available to buy on the net). The chassis is lowered using o-rings placed inside the dampers to restrict their maximum extension. Please don’t hit too heavily at my painting skills – this is more of a fun activity for me and my daughter and my lexan trimming abilities - in general I almost felt like the project is accomplished when I successfully pulled the lexan body off the mould (I used my own resin mould, while heating the lexan in the kitchen oven and the vacuum came from the household vacuum cleaner). The first pull has few imperfections as a result of lack of holes on some parts of the mould that could have allowed the vacuum to pull the lexan, so this is what I am doing currently – improving my mould with drilling holes in the areas I found out they are needed. This is my first project of this kind so I made sure I read all the info there is about this subject and I am also very grateful to all the people that have shared their knowledge on the net. So here are the pictures…

san1

Few more pictures...

MrUnlimited

Good job! Maybe you can do touringcars as wel like Mazda 6, Honda/Acura Accord etc.

san1

Maybe in some near future.. By the way, I assume you mean in the same scale as my pancar body, i.e. roughly in the 1/20 to 1/24 scale, similar to the Losi Micro Rally size)?

hobbieguyz

When are they for sale?

san1

I would say by the end of this week or the beginning of next

hobbieguyz

Good deal let me know

san1

Great, I will do as soon as they are

samnelso

iTrader: (1)

How did you make the mold from the CAD? Did you have someone CNC it for you?

Thanks

san1

Your suggestion is correct samnelso, I have a friend in France (I am in the UK) with a CNC mill, who did it for me, what was left for me was to finish smooth the surface with a sand paper

oXYnary

iTrader: (4)

Do you mean a 3d extruder (plastic) Or are you saying it was milled for a solid piece of aluminum.

san1

He machined it out of epoxy tooling block

jdbugman

i was on the fence on whether to get one of these or not. you just pushed me over. I am getting one of these right now. that is super cool. great job on making your own bodies.

john

san1

Thanks John,

That is great encouragement. In fact I can now say that I feel comfortable enough to let people have these. To follow the forum rules, I will be starting a new thread in the for sale section. You can also pm me if you want further details about the body or any of the other parts.

Regards,
Nick

san1

I just did this, the thread is http://www.rctech.net/forum/r-c-item...cro-rally.html