I’ve mentioned here before how there’s a tiny subculture of slot car nerds who make resin casts of diecast cars to use as slot car bodies. Well, here are two examples of resin casts from Playart cars done by a hobbyist who I consider to be a true craftsman.
If they look familiar, it’s because they are based on Playart cars: a Mercury wagon (Villager? Commuter?) and a Cadillac Eldorado.
Several years ago, I sent a Playart Mercury police wagon with bad paint to Claus Heupel, a fellow slot car collector and racer in Germany, to use as a master for a resin cast body to fit the Aurora Thunderjet chassis. I still have a nice one:
Claus was able to close up the light holes in the roof and add front door handles (the diecast didn’t have them because they would have prevented the stickers from laying flat). He created an amazing resin cast body, and traded and sold many of them with other hobbyists online. As a thank-you for sending him the original, he sent me a couple of the finished casts as well as several other bodies he produced. The Eldorado is one of them.
The Eldorado is painted with a Dupli-Color spray bomb, and the Mercury was left in the pea-soup green in which it was cast, as I thought it was appropriate for the model. If you find pictures of one of Claus’ own examples online, you will see that he did an amazing job of replicating the woodgrain sides found on some of the 1:1 cars...
I have a number of other bodies from Claus, including a Volkswagen Beetle, a Volkswagen Puma, and a mid-70s Mustang Ghia notch back.