In the name of doing way too many projects, I took on one that I couldn’t refuse, for a pretty big client: a daily driver Porsche 356B.
The Hot Wheels 356 Outlaw casting is, according to my research, already a B, which is a good place to start, but, as the aforementioned research concluded, more shaped like a 1962+ B, and not an earlier B, like the 1960 I’m going for.
The main differences between the HW outlaw and the 1960 B are the hood shape, which has a round profile on the 1960 instead of the more square later one, and only one grille out back instead of the two that the HW casting has. As the client was pretty insistent on it, I had to work on reshaping both.
First up, the “easier” one, the hood profile. I’m not 100% happy with how it came out, but I think for my first time using the engraving bit on the dremel, I’m pretty stoked. I think with some paint and the hood chrome strip it’ll look pretty spot-on. I also deleted the more race-inspired hood-mounted fuel filler.
On the engine decklid, I thought for a while how best to tackle it, as I wanted the new grille to be nicely detailed like the ones the HW casting comes with. I decided that the best course of action was to cut out a single grille from a throw-away 356 decklid I had laying around (Never blindly throw away your cut-offs and spares people!) and then cut out a space for it in the body to glue the new part into. One major complication with this, of course, is that the decklid is right where the rear post on the casting sits...
After cutting off the post and carefully sawing out the hole, the next step is to get rid of the two grilles already on the body, so I filled the whole thing with superglue so I can then file it flat before gluing in the donor grille.
Up next are building bumpers front and rear, which I thought about shaping out of styrene strips. If anyone has better ideas, please leave them in the comments below!