This was one car I always wanted as a kid, what could be better than the original Optima with a bunch of Hop-Up parts and lots of gold? I figured after securing a new job I deserved a treat :)

I have made a page for it here where I’ll try and document any interesting things from its life.

Towards the end of last year, the kids and I were invited up to the Hemel Radio Control Car Club for a mornings racing. We didn’t really have any suitable cars but we decided to go along to see what it was like, taking the HPI Bullet and the Tamiya Hotshot along to try them on the track. To cut a long story short, all of us really enjoyed it and before long we had a pair of second hand Team Associated B64s which were much more suitable than the Bullet or the Hotshot. The racing is every other Sunday morning which we managed to get along to fairly often.

This last Sunday I decided to take my Nikon DSLR along and to try and get some pictures. The track mostly covered by trees and the sun wasn’t playing ball so the light was a bit touch and go, but despite that my 18-200mm managed some fairly passable shots for a first attempt. I’ll definitely try again at another meeting, maybe taking the 80-200 next time, figuring the 2.8 aperture will help with the lack of light.

The best of the set are shown below.

Its been a couple of years now since we bought the Bullet, its been a right blast in that time, normally being our first choice of car if we are going to the park, the woods, or the skate park (!). It has stood up really well to anything we’ve thrown at it having only broken a couple of bits in that time; We broke a front hub carrier in an argument with a football goal post, and weirdly a diff shaft snapped which meant we also lost the drive shaft.

However, the one bit of it which is increasingly looking very mangled is the body shell. It has a tendancy to wheelie if you apply full power from a standing start which catches the back of the body on the ground and mangles it up a bit, also after a lot of jumping and landing on the roof the top is starting to crack. So given its having its second birthday we figured it deserved a new body. Originally I planned to buy the same again but when I got round to looking for the finished body, everywhere was out of stock so we grabbed the unpainted and untrimmed plain shell and set to painting it ourselves.

After painting my B64 and using masking tape I wanted to try something I had seen on YouTube, namely Liquid Mask. It looked like a really good solution to the problem of getting the tape around both the curves in the body and the curves in whatever design you want. I bought a bottle “Pro Mask” from a local RC car shop (DMS Racing in Watford) and set to it.

The mask is quite thick so I thinned it out a bit, but I found spraying it on with a normal airbrush just wasn’t cutting it, to get a good build up would take hours. So I grabbed a much bigger paint gun for about a tenner on Amazon. That was much better, I sprayed on 2-3 good thick coats then let it dry. While it was drying I marked out a fairly simple design on the film which HPI put on the outside of the body to protect it during spraying. Then I got to work cutting out the bits on the inside. Yellow first, backed by white, followed by orange and then red, back each with white as I went. I had some window tint left over from the B64 which I used to dark the windows a bit.

After all that it was with some trepidation that I pulled off the protective film from the outside. But as you can see I needn’t have worried, it came out looking pretty good. The lines between the colours are clearly defined with no bleed and overall I’m pretty stoked with it.

Learnings

I learnt a few things along the way:

• Really needed more coats of mask than I used. In some places it was really quite thin and a right pain to get off.
• Don’t be so eager to get on with the next colour, I knocked the yellow while removing the mask for the orange, going through the dry but not completely set paint meaning I had to go in and re-do that bit. Even using a hair dryer I should let each colour cure properly before doing the next.
• A hair dryer really helps!
• The paints I used definitely don’t need thinning, I thinned the yellow by too much and had to put on about 10 coats. I didn’t bother thinning the orange or red and they went on really well straight from the bottle, amazing coverage.
• Cut the body out first! I’ve seen some people cut it out later, which is what I did but its hard going when you are trying your upmost to avoid damaging the paint.

Gallery

I took a few shots along the way, you can see those below. For reference, I didn’t actually paint it in the kitchen, it just happened to be one of the few clear surfaces I could put the body to photo it!

Finished body

After giving the car a good clean and installing the new body mounts I shot a few pics of the finished body. We think it looks great, all ready for another year of bashing!

Both of the kids have been enjoying racing their B64 at our local buggy track recently, however my daughter has been having some issues steering properly around some of the tight corners. This weekend we thought we would practice a bit in a local car park. She has had my M05 on a shelf in her bedroom for a couple of years, lovingly referring to it as ‘My Mini’ :), and often asks if we can take it out so we figured it would be cool to take it out and let her race around some cones. We grabbed some little cones from the garden to mark out a track and set off for a carpark I thought would be deserted. She had loads of fun driving around, getting better as time went on.

I shot a little video of her early on in the morning, you can see she is clearly having difficulty in keeping the car going the way she wants it! But things improved the more laps she did.

I took over control for a bit and I have to say, compared to the buggys I found the handling of the M05 very different, being just 2WD and front wheel drive at that, it is a very different beast. I do wonder if practicing with the Mini will not help her when she comes back to driving the buggys so next time out I’ll swap the Ballistic Buggy Spike tyres on their B64 with a set of Proline Side Locks I have spare.

They are the closest I have to an ‘on road’ tyre, and will save the soft spikes from being worn down on the harsh tarmac of a carpark. We also destroy a couple of the little Nerf cones, so we’ll have to find something else to mark out a track. Hopefully we’ll get out again soon!

I’ve not written about the Team Associated B64s we now own yet, which I’ll get round to at some point but suffice to say the kids have one and I have my own. When I received mine, the ESC case was broken with signs of it being cyno’ed back together at least once. I did the same again hoping it would last for a good while. I’ve since heard anecdotal evidence that these Reedy ESC’s are known to have weak cases.

Well… Last weekend we went racing with the guys from my flying club. Who it turns out mostly run 1/8 scale cars and, unlike the car club we also race with, were mostly bashing around the track. I got a few good laps in, the Ballistic Buggy Spike tyres giving good grip on our astro turf runway.

And then the inevitable happened, I flipped the car, there was no marshalling so the car sat stranded upside down, then 💥 I got hit hard in the left hand side by a big truggy going at speed. Immediately I noticed that applying throttle had no effect so I feared the wost.

Back at home it was clear the ESC case had broken again but this time when I lifed the PCB out of the case one of the little yellow transistors (maybe? I’m no electronics expert) was sitting in the bottom of the case. Oh well ¯\(ツ)/¯ you live and learn.

Asking some of the members of our car racing club, the suggestion was a Hobbywing Quicrun 10BL120 Sensored ESC would be a good replacement, so I placed an order with Modelsport and got one sent.

Last night I got it installed and soldered to the motor, it all seems fine we are back and ready for the next outing.