Fast Five 1963 Corvette Grand Sport (Replica by Mongoose Motorsports)

Base	Hot Wheels Corvette Grand Sport
Mods	Modified and resin cast body, replacement wheels
Card	5th Gen card w/rounded corners & punch, 2013, JS031, F&F5-01
Qty Made	26 incl Prototype

So a bunch of thoughts hit me one day:

1. I'm running out of different styles of cars to sell.
2. I spent all my time this year working on the 1/24 scale JP Explorer project (coming soon to my site) so I didn't finish any new 1/64 cars til like September.
3. I love me some Fast & Furious cars.

That said, I needed to think of a project that I could work on and actually complete by the next round of auctions. To date, this is the fastest I have ever made a batch of cars (about a month and a half), though it was as much determination as anything else.

I started on September 23rd, 2013 with a P case Hot Wheels Corvette Grand Sport. I cut off the roof and figured I was halfway home since it looked a LOT like the car from the movie already. I then ground off the rear deck (this took a second car and some patience. The process of building a new rear deck was pretty daunting. It seems like a simple task to make a shape to replace what I cut away but it took about 8 tries. Some glue, sanding, primer later I had a pretty nice original to make a mold.

The first body mold lasted only 13 pulls then broke, so I had to make another. Not my favorite thing. The second mold came out great so I was able to make 12 more and have 25 cars!

I was able to cut all the glass sections reliably, and I had to 'tub' the chassis to accommodate the wheels. The wheels are all from a brief range of cars released around 1999-2001 and are the rear wheels from those cars only with the lace and thicker sidewalls and correct width. So for 25 cars I had to buy a minimum of 50 donor cars. That got kinda pricey and pretty tough to track down. I drove all over town, hunted on eBay for deals.. it took a while. The nice thing though, was that certain GT40 cars had the right wheels AND I was planning to make a round of GT40s from Fast Five anyway, so win-win with those purchases. All in all I bought around 80 cars for this project! I also completed 8 GT40s while working on these cars.

I worked on the cars assembly-line style in batches so I wouldn't get too bored with it. I made waterslide decals for the hood emblem and license plate, which came out really nice.

Some interesting things to note, maybe this is just for my memory.

Finding nearly 30 of those base Grand Sports was pretty tough. They were 2 per case, but thankfully they repeated them through Q case. I had a friend in another state helping me as well.
The original interior and chassis were bright blue and bright yellow respectively. I tried dyeing them to save time and paint fumes. Epic fail. I ended up melting the parts and you couldn't tell they had been boiling in hot black RIT dye for 30 minutes.
I also had a helluva time finding a decent sized pot at Goodwill. I finally had to settle for a little one. Probably not big enough to cook meth in.
I inverted a palm sander and mounted it to a bench vise and rubbed the wheels on it to roughen them up. This makes them look a little more like real tires while still being plastic.
I added E6000 and buckshot (mixed like lead pie filling) to the bodies to make them weigh more than the resin. I intend to add weights to cars that are resin-bodied from now on.
I decided to change the number scheme down a decimal.. I don't know why I started with so many zeros. More than 100 series? Plausible. 1000? Probably not.
I have fully embraced the binder clip/popsicle stick method of securing the blister to the card now. I used every one in the house, including the inexplicable pink one.