Ok, I’ve been wanting a new body for my touring car for a while. I’ve been running Tamiya’s Raybrig body since I first bought the TA05IFS, but didn’t use enough time to make it cool and neither did I have RC-lights.

I wanted Ford GT500 body, but it didn’t/don’t exists and I didn’t want to create one from the scratch either. My best choice then was HPI’s GT-R.

I always cut the body first, drill holes and grind uneven areas with sandpaper. Front was cuttet to be able to have a grind in front, made holes for lower light’s and added stickers both front and back for disguising lights.

Step one in painting was black.

Doing a new disguising for middle part, to make inside a bit cleaner. Due to holes in the front, I was unlucky with disguising the front and had some leaks. Damn leaks.

From distance the car turned out great! If we look closer we can see all the leaks I had because of bad, bad tape. Next step was to darken the windows, but I was stupid enough to remove the lexan cover before doing so and I had to create me a new one.

To disguise back lights I used stickers shipped with the car. I cut them the way I wanted and it did fit like I wanted. I now had to use it’s shape to create a light bucket. For making light buckets I find it best to make it in paper first, it’s cheap, easy to use and environment friendly. You can see on left image below how I got the first shape to start with then I just added 0,5cm etc. for what I thought would be enough.

Being a perfectionist and all, I had to do this a couple of times before I was satisfied.

When it finally fit, I unfolded the paper again and taped it to 0.10mm thick metal I used and cut it out.

Front light’s are basically the same, but I had to cut my shape in half since i were going to put a cone in there.

Putting the pieces together was a hell because it the pieces didn’t have any areas to connect togheter, the only thing was the cone and it was going in after they were connected.

Mounting the lights with double sided tape.

GT500 knight rider has read light in the front. This car don’t have the same opening at front, so I had to improvise and make a crack another place. I also tried with underglow, but it didn’t look good enough.

I used a simple 6,0V light system to start with on this car, but I had to modify it allot since I were going to use 13 LEDs and not 6. I wanted to power this system directly from driving battery which is a 3S lipo battery, this means 9-12.6v. To be able to use such high voltage on light system, I had to put int resistors. To calculate resistors for each parallel connected resistor I used the formula Vr = (V-Vwanted)/I.

If you want to view all the images for this project feel free to browse my gallery below.

Ford GT-R – Knight rider edition

Guide on how to make a needle shooting peg gun. The author of this tutorial can not be hold responsibility for any harm this weapon might cause on anything or any one. Use with caution.

As a child I was able to make my self a neat gun which could fire over 5 meters and still being cheap and cool. Now I will share how I made it before I completly forget it.

To complete this tutorial you’ll need the following

• wooden clothing peg (check first image)
• rubber band
• small saw or you can just break of the first part
• needle, toothpick, match or something similar for ammunition

1. Split your peg.

2. Saw and grind.

Gently saw the parts off and keep the biggest part. You only want to do this to one of the pieces. If you don’t have a saw it’ll do just breaking off the larger piece and forget about the small at the back (upper in picture below).

The piece you haven’t touched now needs some grinding where the spring is going to be sitting. Make sure you make enough room for the spring to securely stay in it’s place (check step 3).

3. Put it together.

Put the spring back on the biggest piece you just grined and mount the upper piece (now refereed to as the re-loader) with a rubber band. Please do use a smaller rubber. I didn’t have any other band when making this tutorial. Make sure the re-loader is not to tight mounted, this will cause the projectile to eject slower and shoot shorter.

4. Re-loading and arming.

Pull the re-loader forward until you hit the spring. Pull the re-loader down and backwards until the spring is locked in it’s position. Now arm your weapon with desired ammunition.

Troubleshoot

• If the spring is stuck in arming position, you may have to grind it’s lock-hole a bit.
• If above dosen’t work because the spring is slipping from it’s place underneath the gun, you didn’t grind a good enough room for it.
• When your spring is going back inside the re-loader when fireing, you didn’t saw off enough at the end of it. Grind off some more.

Again; use with caution. Do not aim at any human, animals or like. This is not a toy.

This post will explain how I do my backups.

In case my crontab should be deleted or lost, I have the script in an own file. Like in my code-nippets.

My computer is only used by me so I only need to backup my home-dir, where I save everything. /dev/sda5 is mounted to /home.

This script backups my home directory to one of my external harddrives, as long as the backup dir on the disk hasn’t been edited the last day and rsync is not running. Off course, rsync could run in other situations, but I don’t want to run two rsync’s at once and is therefore added as a case. It would probably consume all the bandwidth on my laptop when running two rsyncs on my slow 5400rpm harddrive.

if [ -d "/media/WD Elements/backup/" ] && [ -z "`ps --no-heading -C rsync`" ] && [ "`ls -ld /media/WD\ Elements/backup | awk '{print $6}'`" != "`date '+%Y-%m-%d'`" ];
then
rsync -au --force --delete-during /home/vegard/. /media/WD\ Elements/backup;
fi

Code above is from “/home/vegard/Linux/backup.sh” which runs every 5 min, using crontab. Use `crontab -e` to insert your cron-rule.

*/5 * * * * /bin/bash /home/vegard/Linux/backup.sh

Keeping backup of your webhotel is also important, and since I’m allowed ssh access to mine I can use sftp to download my files.

In “/home/vegard/Linux/sftp.sh” i have:
lftp -e "mirror . /home/vegard/Backup/hammerseth.com/" sftp://<user>@<host>/path

For the password, you can use ssh-keyrigs or if you dare sftp://<user>:<passwd>@<host>/path

The file above is run each sunday at 18:00 with this cron-rule
0 18 * * 0 /bin/bash /home/vegard/Linux/sftp.sh

I should also mention that I’m using a wordpress-plugin called WordPress Database Backup which mails all my database tables to my email, every week. Quite handy.

Be safe.