Aoshima Pajero conversion

[nugundam93]

for a late update since my thesis and our family business were (oh wait, they still are) placing demands on my free time.

So after spraying the last clearcoat, an hour later I saw this on the roof (see 1st pic) and i thought it would go away after wetsanding to level the paint but it was still there (2nd pic). My friends thought it might have been the too-thick 2k urethane clear attacking the bottom layers to the point that the sunroof's seams started showing up.



Anyway, I decided to start wetsanding everything in preparation for the polishing. Here's the sanded side (right side of the body) versus the unsanded side (left side of the body)




I decided to mask off the roof part and just respray the color layer and later a few thin clear coats. Also masked off some parts on the right side as there were some deep scratches (see lower sill) and to fix up the puttied part on the right rear fender. I also cut off the rear doors' door handles.




As of this time, I still have to shoot the silver, and clearcoat everything that i repainted, but i have trimmed the hoodscoop to look better.

[Some_Kid]

Good call. You've put so much work into it I think it would hurt your persistence to get it done if you stripped the body and re puttied.

What if you made a roof rack for it? That could hide it nicely.

I love Montero's so I'm following this close. I wish a company would make a 2001 Montero kit or even a Land Rover Discovery. Those are my favorite 4x4's.

[nugundam93]

If i redid the body...i'd probably put this back in the box and go back to gundams...and take another attempt at this a few years later. Lol. Anyway, the 1:1 doesn't have a roof rack so a roof repaint is the only way to go.

And i do wish aoshima did other pajero models, not just variants of the 2nd gen LWB ones. If they made a pajero evo (both the swb street version and the dakar ones) and the 3rd gen and 4th gen pajeros i'd be the happiest man alive

[jzx100]

c'mon bro.. quit stalling and get it done. Amazing job so far.. why stop now?

Its not just any other 1:24, this model represents your 1:1.

So get off the couch and get the job done.

Waiting for updates

[nugundam93]

only update so far is i've resprayed the roof and will wetsand it later on. oh, also trimmed the underside of the hood scoop to make it look in-scale. crunch time with my thesis (submitted it to my critic and if that passes, on to final defense) just made work on all my kits stop. once that's done i'll get back to working on all these

[jzx100]

best of luck with the thesis and hope everything goes well.

[nugundam93]

Finally finished my postgrad study and managed to find time to resume working on this kit. Additional motivation came in the form of a local hobby shop's meet-and-greet this coming saturday with the export manager of Aoshima. The hobby shop requested that we bring Aoshima kits and show them how we build it.

Started with a mockup of the 2-bar grille (the kit's grille had 3-bars):


Also duplicated the door handles from a Tamiya Pajero. In retrospect, i shouldn't have shaved off the door handles on this kit and just cut them off to reattach later. oh well.


Body and chassis


Test-fit. Because of the excess epoxyclay that I put as reinforcement on the inside of the body, it was a STRUGGLE to get the chassis inside the body.


The rims. The original one's the silver, while the pink ones are the recasts (I used 2-part epoxy mixed with some talcum powder).


The rims, painted chrome silver but given a polyurethane clearcoat to dull the chrome silver to silver.


The taillamps painted. I eventually applied aluminum tape to the borders to get a chrome look.

[nugundam93]

I am proving to be such a klutz with clear parts. I broke the original windshield in half so I had to order a replacement clear parts runner from Aoshima. When the time came to remove it from the runner, i managed to crack the windshield again, despite using a sharp cutter. ugh.


So I made a mold from oyumaru to create a master for vacuforming (managed to have a friend buy 2 big sheets of 0.4mm tamiya clear plaplate for this purpose).


And onto the worst case of RTFM. I bought a spraycan of clear polyurethane and sprayed one mist coat on the hood and skirt parts since I had to refinish them. After 7 hours, I spray the next coat, and the paint simply wrinkled like crazy. In panic, I read the entire label (I only read half of it earlier) and to my horror, it was explicitly stated that to avoid wrinkling, i should either spray the next coat within 2 hours, or wait until the paint fully cures after 5 days. *facepalm*


Here's the rest of the clear parts awaiting surgery. The kit had a one-piece 3rd row glass while the 1:1 car had a 2-piece sliding 3rd row glass.


Here's the latter part of the 3rd-row glass, sanded down with 1200 and 2000 grit to remove the "frosted" areas it was originally molded with.


Here's the main glass body, given the same sanding to remove "frosted" areas.


And here's the glass areas after wetsanding with 3k grit and rubbing with a 3-grit (coarse, medium, fine) nail sanding sponge. Polishing to follow. The 1st pic shows the left glass part as polished with the sponge while the right one only had a 3k grit wetsanding.

[nugundam93]

Masked off one rim with electrical tape as I was about to grind off the center cap for the spare tire.


Here's the body:



I still have to upload the other pics, but as of writing, I've already finished drilling out the rim's center cap, chromed the taillamp edges, added an aluminum tape to the roof and window trim to simulate chrome, attached the side skirts (it's actually visible in some of the pics) and detailed it, and made some decals for the various trim and stickers on the body and glass areas, and put the same tint on the glass areas as the 1:1 has.

I still have to make a replacement windshield - tried to shape one using just a heatgun and it just doesn't work. I really need to vacuform one and use a heatgun to shape it. i've tried using boiling water to reshape the 0.4mm clear plaplate and it doesn't work, probably because it's too thick.

[nugundam93]

Finally here's the rest of the pics. Managed to actually finish this last year, in time for a meet-and-greet with Aoshima's export manager, Nao-san (hosted by JMN Hobby, a local hobby shop who became Aoshima's official distributor in the Philippines).

Managed to misplace the original grille that I modified, so I had to scratchbuild one. Also in the pic is a recast upper part of the rear chrome bumper from the Tamiya kit. Aoshima's kit only had a flat surface when it shouldn't be.




Scratchbuilt interior trim for the 3rd-row windows.



Taped off parts of the front fascia so I could use 2-part clear epoxy to fill in parts of the corner lamps.


Unfortunately, I managed to reformat my phone's memory card and lost the other WIP pictures The completed build thread is now in the completed builds section.