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Back to the Future III Needles' Ford Pickup Truck |
| Base | Hot Wheels 4th of July 2009 Texas Drive 'Em |
| Mods | Stripped/repainted, winch ground off, tailgate relocated, clear glass |
| Card | 4th Gen card w/rounded corners & punch, 2010, JS0021, BTTF-05 |
| Qty Made | 16 incl Prototype |
While vacationing at Universal Studios Hollywood I stopped in a local toy store and found a bunch of the Hot Wheels Classics series 5 cars, one of which happened to be this casting. I instantly thought of Needles' Ford F-150 from the end of BTTF3. But they were like $5 each. Nuts to that. Clealy sensing my disgust, Mattel released the same casting in the 4th of July series at $2 each so my friends and I rounded up 16-17 of them for me to start this project.
Each truck was fully die cast metal, had plastic molded motorcycles in the back, tailgate down, and had a hideous yellow windshield. Having done the "canvas" soft top for Nedry's Jeep I knew I could replicate and cast clear parts.At best I could do 2-3 a day and that was just an ongoing pain in the ass. The $5 each wasn't looking too bad after that! The trick to this truck was having to hack off and replace15 tailgates and grind off 15 winches from the front. That and having to source the General Lee style American Racing Vectors or something close enough.
Massive amounts of time with the dremel and some krazy glue took care of the tailgate and winch. I got my metalworking wings on this project for sure. The wheels are actually from a Matchbox Range Rover (so yeah, we had to find 16 of those too) and I slowly, and I mean snail's pace slowly took a rounded dremel bit by hand and sanded the 10-double spoked wheels down to 10 single spoke wheels. I could only do so many in a day as my hands would cramp up! The motorcycles had to be cut off as well, but of course not having planned for them to be removed, they were sort of an integral part of the pickup bed. Some time with a lighter and some glue straightened it all out but it was just another process to have to repeat over and over.
Painting was 100% by hand with a brush. They did not offer the color in spray so it was old school modeling time for me. I do own an airbrush but haven't fired that up in probably 15 years. Too much work to set it all up. Our family moved to New Mexico right when I had most of these trucks almost done except the roll bars. Once we got settled (read: months) I finally sat down to hand-make 15 more roll bars and hit them with chrome spray paint.
The bottoms of the cars are numbered to 15. 10 of the 15 cars were individually carded, and 5 are reserved for an upcoming 3-pack with Marty's Truck and an exclusive Rolls Royce!
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