Hot spoon fender flaring

[grandsport3]

Afternoon Fellows,

A long, long time ago in the mid-60s, I was reading a Model Car & Track (excellent mag by the way) and read in a column by Jose Rodriguez Jr. about flaring the wheel wells of model car bodies and slot car bodies by using a heated spoon according to the shape of the spoon and the flare you want. I tried this about two months ago on an Eldon white hard plastic Lola T70 slot car body, rear tire wells. The wells did flare fairly easy but very thin, I didn't want to thin it out too much and they will have be be underlayed by some curved white polystyrene strips and filled with putty. T70's have an oblong well wells, not rounded so some filling the gap will have to be done.

My real concern is flaring poly butyrate the old 60's clear slot car body material. Will it melt quickly or slowly? If the body is painted will the hot spoon destroy the paint?

Dan Gurneys Last Lola T70-Ford did have some fairly extensive flaring on the whole wheel well, not just the edges.

Please reply, thanx for viewing, John

[oldjohnny]

Good luck flaring old clear bodies with any sort of control..back then I did it a few times..usually with disasterous results..and yes, paint will fail if only because it won’t react to heat in same way the plastic does

[mustang1989]

That's an interesting approach to fender flaring GS. I wonder if there's a video on it somewhere. Consistency would be one of the things that I would be worried about between the two sides.