Banpei's two door panda Trueno from Japan

[banpei]

As I had already invested 13 hours in printing, I didn't fancy printing them another time. The screws that I used split two out of four posts, so what I ended up doing is drilling a small hole in the material to allow longer screws to secure them. For the next version, having melt-in posts would be a much better idea. If I redo them someday, I'll definitely do that.

Last night I cut the new parcel shelf and glued the blue fabric on. I also painted the parcel shelf covers and mounted them on the shelf:

The fabric was glued on the old parcel shelf, but the old softboard was already suffering from delamination. So I managed to peel off the fabric with the top layer of the softboard. This made it much easier to glue it on.

This afternoon I went to the garage, mounted the speakers and fitted the new parcel shelf to the car:

It's a perfect fit!
I only attached it with three of the plastic fasteners as I need to replace those with new ones. I've kept one to compare with what the local parts store has in stock.
While I had all the covers off, I replaced the sound deadening that was removed when the rear arches were welded. Hopefully, this results in less road noise.

This is what it looked like before and after I was done:




Then you might have spotted the door cups in the first photo. Up until now, I didn't have the time to mount them. While I was already busy removing all panels in the rear, I also removed the door cards and replaced the door cups:

I really need to find a way to match the door cards with this original colour. I have already cleaned them thoroughly in the past and I'm afraid painting them like I did with some of the plastic panels will not make them look nice.

My car didn't come with a retainer for the spare wheel. I mocked up something in Freecad with a stepped-down holder using the dimensions of the Black Racing wheels and the OEM Toyota wheels.

I can improve it by also adding the Almex Y3B dimensions and changing the hole to a six-sided M8-sized hole. At least the current one is functional, and I no longer have to suffer from clunking noises on every speed bump.

Some time ago, I complained about one of the side markers being hazy and discoloured. I found a really cheap one with a small defect on Yahoo Auctions:


So I tried to fix it by plastic welding it:



And then I filed it down to make it smooth again:

I left the weld on the rear of the side marker, as that's where I thought it would need reinforcement.

This is before the first (guide)coat of paint:

Then I found that there were still some visible marks, filled them up and sanded them down. I had a couple of rinses and repeats to make it smooth. I forgot to take photos of the final result, but it looked decent enough. Under a certain angle, the repair was still visible. So I also fitted this side marker to the car this afternoon. Unfortunately, the weld on the rear was pushing against the front fender too much. This then made the crack visible again, but with the cracked paint all my work was in vain...
I'll now move to plan B: put the side marker in the oven to make the glue melt, and then transplant the orange part to the original side marker.

I also finished the Trueno bumper badge and fitted it to the car. Even though I test-fitted it yesterday, I didn't realise the PTEG version was lacking one important aspect: it didn't clamp well enough on the bumper shrouds!
The badge is clamping itself on both ends of the badge as seen in this picture:

The retaining bolt on the rear isn't holding it in. It's there purely to prevent theft or falling off when it's too loose.
The badges printed in PLA clamped fine, so my guess is that it's caused by me sanding down the printed badge to remove print defects.


I did fit it to the car, and it looks like this:

I'm happy with the way it looks, but unfortunately, I have to print it all over again.

As you may have noticed already, I have swapped the Almex wheels for the Black Racing ones:

The reason is that I want to repaint parts of the centre of the Almex wheels and also give the other bits a quick polish.