styrene willys build

[nickrohde121]

Wasnt getting much of a response from people in the scx thread so I thought I would post it up here and see if you guys are more interested. I have a 1:1 cj3a that I have been building and wheeling for a while, but am now up in college and had to leave the old girl behind. I picked up one of the scx10 deadbolts and decided to build my own body for it, cause the Hasbros are gettin pretty rediculous on EBAY. Even though I have never worked with styrene before.

On to the Pictures.

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I started off drawing this up to get an idea what I was after, sort of a rock bouncer mixed with a crawler buggy.

Sketch up then let me do a print out of all the pieces and exactly how they would need to be cut and bent.

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After a few days of messing with the tubes and gettin frustrated with the styrene tube, I decided to move on to something a bit easier, and luckily the old flatty's have pretty flat pannels. I forgot to take pictures for the first day so It will just start where I started taking pictures.













Here it is side by side to the deabolt body, pretty close in dimensions.



I then got bored one night and instead of following my original plan I decided to just finish out the back half of the body.





Heres a picture of my 1:1 for a little reference. It is on custom width 44's and 35 km2's. I built the axles and pretty much everything on it in my driveway. I love the low center of gravity trend that has been going on for a little while and decided to follow that, it is on less then stock springs, and only sits about 2 inches taller then a bone stock willys. While still having plenty of travel for the Rubicon, which I live about 30 minutes from.

[Mike Flea]

I like it, and will be watching this build. Once you reinforce the panels, and finish out the body, I bet it turns out real nice, you're quite the craftsman.

[nickrohde121]

So ive gotten some work done on it, still not finished but I did paint it up for a run I went out on. Dont have any pictures of the run, forgot my phone in the truck...

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This is how it sat for the run, after that I did some detail decals and painted the rock rings.

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These little decals were a royal pain in the arse, We couldnt get my mother in laws vinyl cutter to go into fine enough detail for the actual letters to work, so I used the cut off pieces as a stencil to paint them in, not perfect, but for how small they are I can accept it.

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[nickrohde121]

Well After working on a cage out of styrene ( no access to my welding equipment for now) and having it break on the first roll-over, I got to thinking and thought of something simple. I still had the cage from the deadbolt laying around.

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It fit very well right off the bat, hugs the windshield tightly and fits the other over all dimensions. I simply had to make some extensions of the legs that would be strong enough, and I ended up using something everybody has laying around, clothes hangers. I drilled and tapped the ends and used some all thread to thread them on to the stock posts, then screwed the cage down to the body. I still need to paint it black but this gives you the general idea. Gives you an easy way to get to a strong cage that can and has taken a beating.

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