Scale Land Rover body's and accessories

[WLJayne]

Hi guys,

I'm new here, and I've come with some questions for you . I'm new to RC rock crawling, though I've been a modeller all my life and as a dayjob I design plastic kits for a large wargames company. I'm also a keen Land Rover enthusiast and sooner or later the two passions were bound to intersect .

A fellow Lany owning buddy and I were talking about how cool it would be to build scale Landy's that drove like the real thing and a few google searches later here I am. I'm especially impressed with the SCX10 chassis and I'd love to build one some time soon. Being a scale scratchbuilding nut I'd almost certainly scratchbuild a body and make tons of expedition accessories for it, I'm crazy like that. But I was wondering whether it would be worth developing a proper kit or two for sale. I've designed and sold my own scale kits in the past for other subjects and they've done really well (should never have sold up, silly me!), and I thought it would be cool to offer something new and wanted to see whether there would be any interest. I've seen the Defender bodies out there aswell as some of the Kamtec vac form bodies and they're nice but there's still alot of subject to cover.

I was thinking of starting with the Discovery 1, as it's a real classic and has a huge variety of accessories and such so would be an ideal subject. I'd do it for myself anyway but if there's interest I could put a kit out. The body would probably be either lightweight GRP or Vac Formed ABS/Polycarbonate. All the trim and small parts (wing mirros etc) would be cast in high impact polyurethane resin which is just about bullet proof. For extra saftey I'd probably secure everything with rare earth magnets so they could pop off in the event of a roll so as not to damage them.

Anyway I'm probably going into too much detail. Suffice it to say that I'm looking at developing a range if kits to gradually build a range on top of my job and hopefully it would get big enough to do full time. If it isn't this I will probably go back to scale resin kits, ships and aircraft mostly - but hey no reason why I couldn't do both.

So what do you guys think? Would you be interested?

Will .

[Arctic Fire]

Welcome! Vacuum forming experience and plastics design will get you noticed here, I'm sure. I'm pretty sure i speak for everyone on this site when I say, if you build it, and it's unique, we will buy it! Just make sure that when your rich and famous from the Discovery 1 you make and send me a current gen Range Rover Sport body!

[Big Mike]

Welcome Will!

Sounds like you have my dream job, a genuine custom model builder. Damn you are a lucky guy. Here's a little input from my perspective:

Speaking from a strictly scale point of view, it takes a very detailed vac-formed body to grab my interest these days.

Injection-molded polystyrene bodies capture all the detail of the 1:1 counterpart but they can be on the fragile side.

I've often wondered about using a different material that would be a bit softer, more flexible and able to withstand more abuse. Like a urethane-based plastic? I also like the idea of using rare-earth magnets to mount mirrors and such. Hit something hard enough and it just pops off. Provided it doesn't fall somewhere inaccessible you just pick it up and pop it back on. Carrying the rare-earth magnet concept over into the body mounting process would be a good idea as well

I'd really like to see what someone with your background and skillset could come up with as far as a scratch-built Discovery. That is a logical step 1 for you, build it up and make a thread for it. People here will take notice, most especially if you're carrying model building concepts into the body manufacturing procedure. A lot of the scale folks are into as much detail as can be realistically had.

Have you found RC4WD yet?? Gelände D110 Ultimate Scale Truck (RTR)

[01_DiscoII]

I would love one! I currently own a disco II hence the name!

[badger]

Welcome to the site Will. Do me a favor and read the vendor section of the rules.
http://www.rccrawler.com/forum/misc.php?do=cfrules