'60s style '56 VW Bug street/strip machine - Updated 3-16

Lately I’ve been continuing my experiments with large area decals as I develop techniques to replicate various lettering and paint styles. This time my guinea pig is a Gunze Sangyo ’56 VW Bug which I’m doing as a 60’s style customized street rod and weekend drag racer. The front end has been lowered 3 scale inches. The rear tires are the little narrow slicks that come in the recent Revell Slingster kit. Other than that the mockup is straight out of the box. The areas that will get the 60’s style panel treatment have paper cutouts of the decal templates I’ve made. The kit is a curbside, although, in typical Japanese style, quite well detailed. The wheels will be either period mags of the type offered by EMPI at the time, or perhaps Moon discs. I plan to cut out the engine cover and pop it open across the upper edge, a cooling trick popular with these types of cars. I haven’t decided whether I’ll customize the interior, since the emphasis is on the paint, stance and wheels. Paint will most likely be either a red or green candy metallic with complementary fogged panels.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.





These are the EMPI wheels I’m contemplating. Oddly enough both styles can be found in the various Revell “Rat Rod” ’29 Ford Roadster Pickup and ’30 Ford Sedan kits.

Very nice start !!!!

should look cool!!

Thanx!

The Bug is up on its wheels with most of the final mechanical work completed. I’m going with the shallow offset Torq-Thrust style wheels from the Revell ’29 Ford Roadster Pickup kit. They’ll pass for EMPIs to my eyes. The chassis is assembled and paint detailed. There’s no engine in this curbside kit but the engine compartment is finished out in matte black in the hopes it will “disappear”. I modified a rill bar from an AMT ’40 Ford kit and installed it. The stance is set and the wheels adapted to the Gunze kit suspension with, as mentioned last time, the front suspension lowered about 3 scale inches. I cut open the engine cover and fabricated offset hinges to represent the typical popped-open hood on modified Bugs. The interior will be largely stock other than the roll bar. Now for the critical part: paint and trim.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.

I’ve been concentrating on the paint and decal art. Everything isn’t quite settled yet, but it looks like I’m going towards gold paint and white decal stock with contrasting red graphics. I’ve also included a vintage EMPI trade logo for a race car flavor. I’ll be trying out a roof panel, and perhaps fender scallops, although I’m concerned that the design might get too busy if I include the fender details. We’ll see… The decals you see on the car were an interim design before I added the EMPI logo. That's the cool thing about working with decals, you can make some pretty radical mods without trashing the paint.

Here’s where I’m at so far.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.

I’ve been concentrating on the decal design side of this project. One decision I had made was to use white decal paper in order to get white backgrounds and color into the graphics. As many of you may know, inkjet printers “assume” white paper and overlay transparent inks onto the white to make color images. If you use clear decal paper the white disappears and the base paint color on the bodywork shows through. White decal paper is very opaque and results in a true color when you print. But white decal paper has some serious downsides. One is that you must cut your decals out very accurately in order to avoid any white edges. Even then, because white decal paper is significantly thicker that clear decal paper, some white may show along the edges. Wherever possible you should design around this issue.

The other significant negative about white decal paper is that is much stiffer and less stretchable than clear. This means that if you are applying white decal stock to a compound curve the decals may bubble or fold on themselves. They may even crack along the surface. The roof of my VW bug is very much compound curved, curving continuously in all directions with virtually no flat surfaces. I attempted to make a single sheet decal for the roof, and while dimensionally it was extremely accurate, the decal would not lay flat and conform to the roof’s shape. It wrinkled and bubbled and cracked. The ink layer broke up as a result. A true disaster!!! Take a look:



So I went back and redesigned the roof art so it could be assembled from several smaller pieces of decal. Here’s the result:



I also experimented with additional panels on the sides as well as the tops of both the front and rear fenders. As I had feared, the overall look got too busy, so I opted to only put scallops of the front fender tops, leaving large areas of gold on the sides of the front fenders and the rear fenders untouched. It should complement to areas of gold on the roof redesign. Here is the final decal art:



Unfortunately all the experimenting meant that I ran out of white decal paper. I ordered some but for now I can’t show pictures of the final art. Below are a couple of pictures shopping the additional scallops on the front fenders and the rear quarter panels.





Once the decal paper gets here I’ll apply the final graphics and can move one to clear coating and the remaining mechanical and interior work.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.

After a brief break to finish up a Revell ’29 Ford Roadster, I finally got all the decals applied. There are 20 separate decals on this car. Some are very large like the two side panels between the fenders. Others, like the star-shaped scallops at the corners and the Raus Haus text strips, are very small and thin. The white decal stock is thicker than clear decal stock and far more rigid. It also doesn’t adhere as well. And, because of the white color you have to cut them very precisely if you want to avoid white edges on everything. The bottom line is they are a real PITA to apply, big or small. I actually had to print out additional copies of several of them in order to get them down right. Phew! But it’s done now.

Below are a couple of photos of the final decal applied. Next steps are to clear coat everything and then move on to (hopefully) fabricate a stinger exhaust and then final assembly.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.

Looks awesome!

Thanx Darryl. Since you are a bona fide VeeDub enthusiast and expert I'm delighted you like it.

With all the decals applied and the color coats well cured I applied three coats of Duplicolor Clear. Once the clear was cured I foiled the basic trim and then fabricated a stinger exhaust from styrene rod and a paint brush ferrule. And lastly I glued the wheels and tires in place. Here are two photos of where I’m at. Next up is the interior and then final assembly.

Thanx for lookin’,
B.

Excellent job on those decals and that exhaust is wild. This is turning into one wild vw

Cool looking bug