The time has finally come to call the build finished! The car is assembled, dyed, painted, fitted with electronics and completely drivable. The first battlescars are already on it actually.
So let's start with where we left off last time. All of the parts needed to get their final colours. I decided on a white/blue/black colourscheme to match with the Shapeways colours, but also because I thought the combination would give the car a clean look while making sure that the printed parts would stand out.
I would be using 2 different methods for the colours. The bodypanels would be spraypainted, and all other suspensioncomponents dyed using our normal Shapeways finish.
If you watch episode 3 of our videoseries you can have a look at how we polish and dye our strong&flexible nylon parts in the Shapeways factory. Afterwards I sealed all the parts by spraying them with a clear coat. This makes the colour pop a bit more and most importantly makes it easier to clean the parts after a day of racing.
The wheels and cage were dyed black. I painted the spokes of the wheels with white Tamiya acrylic paint later, as trying to mask and spray the wheels turned out to be a little bit tricky'er than I expected.
And here's all the blue parts after getting a clearcoat.
The body panels required a little bit more elbow grease. I wanted to get rid of all the stepping that comes with 3D printing and make the panels super smooth. I sprayed a couple of thin layers of primer inbetween sanding to be able to see where I needed to sand a little more. The paint will stick in the deeper ridges and makes it easier to spot them. I went through this cycle a couple of times going from 180 grit up to 400 grit sand paper before putting on the final layer of primer.
Here's the panels in a couple of different stages. On the far left you can see the roof that just got its final layer of gloss white paint. The rear spoiler also got dyed black, and later the endplates masked up and sprayed gloss white.
After assembling most of the car, all that was left to do was install the electronics.
I chose to use the ESC and motor that come with the kit, and a basic Futaba servo for now. When I will take it for serious racing I will replace it with a coreless RC OMG servo, RC OMG brushless ESC and a 17.5 turn motor. I did shorten and black out (shrinktube and snakeskin) most of the wires to give the car a clean look. I also directly soldered the motorwires and added 4mm goldplugs for the battery.
And finally there's a finished car
Looking from underneath it's easy to spot all the upgrades.
The little mascot I put on all the cars I build.
A small but very important upgrade when you take this car over jumps. It all fits so well together too!
Yes, I made a mistake putting the shockmounts on up-side-down. This is something that happens every now and then when you're building something as heavily modified as the Superfly. I will fix it though. I love the look of the IFS
For me the wheels really set this car apart. They keep the classic small diameter look, but with BIG FAT tires on them. I've had a couple people question what tires I was using because of the big side-wall.
Please also watch the last installment of our video series. You can see it here on the Shapeways blog:
https://www.shapeways.com/blog/archi...nish-line.html
Or directly on YouTube:
That's it
for now. Thanks for watching and I hope you've enjoyed the build.