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