or What to do with El Jeffe/The Boat
With the Capri dead, the Mustang ready to go racing, and the new truck added to our team, we started working on the new design. As always we have two goals with our car designs. 1) Stay within our “Garage Heroes” thematic lane and 2) Try to make a car better than any of our prior efforts. So here we are, looking at our new (to us) Chevy S-10/Isuzu Hombre. Mechanically, it seems in almost race ready condition. We do have a clutch line bleeding issue to work through but even I should be able to get through that. Any ideas on what our Chevy S-10 truck theme design could be or should be?
Complicating issues are that we don’t have a lot of time to work through this and we are weather dependent, as all our work is outside until we get another house with a garage. Also, it is a race truck, so that lends to general direction and eliminates several design direction choices. Â
Too Much? Come on you know us by now
Enter Labor Day weekend. We have our racing team mates / brother and sister in law’s family up for the long weekend. Initially reason was for them to get away from home and spend some time with us and the new addition to our family. Zoe Lemons Fischer.
Far be it from me to push things along, but I wanted to get a new theme in place for our upcoming race at New Hampshire in 6 weeks. After looking at the a 1997 Isuzu Hombre truck, we agreed on a theme and direction. Now a little birthday guilt from me and the whole team was off to Home Depot to start working on our new theme. The centerpiece was intended to mount onto the roof of the car. We would also do our usual at home paint job and apply several decals to mostly finish up. We like to try to leave some time for dialing in our themes with final additions and tweaks.
What is the theme for a super hero car that is actually a truck? We thought immediately of the Hulk. Our initial plan was to have a Hulk head on the cab of the truck and then have the body extend out the bed of the truck down to having some large Hulk feet at the end of the bed. Was the Hulk captured, sleeping it off after a night of partying with Thor, getting a limo ride home from “Super Uber”, we weren’t sure at this point, but let’s not have a plan get in the way of progress.
We stated with three different paths to make a head. One was to build it out of spray foam around a PVC tube and mounting bracket. The second was to build it out of solid foam insialtion boards and then scuplt and/or foam as needed. The last way was that we found a Halloween decoration head that we woudl use to build up a Hulk head onto it with spray foam insualtion. with three ways of making it, one of them had to work. How hard coudl it be?
If you remember, we made “Bondo” to drive along on top of the Mustang our of PVC tubing and spray foam. However, the foam we used wasn’t great for detailed shaping since it had large open pores on the inside, kind of reminiscent of some overly rustic breads. So this time, we tried a new spray foam that worked much better. It was XXXXfddX spray foam. It does not expand as much, but it does have a finer pore structure and is much more easily formed and shaped. than the old foam we tried earlier.
As most of you know, I have zero/negative artistic ability, so Jennifer and Vicki took the reigns on making the Hulk head and the rest of the truck theme design. Progress was pretty quick. We tried the new foam and it seemed to work great. We used a variety of shaping techniques, some working better than others, but all making a huge mess, lol. We ended up liking the Dremel with a barrel sander attachment as the best for fine work. For larger material removal we went with a sure-form type of tool with a variety of sizes being handy. We did end up purchasing a hot foam cutter set, but it wouldn’t arrive in time for this one. we can report back on its use on our next project.
Initial Sculpting Touch up required Foam hair extensions
So the Hulk ended up taking about 2 days to fabricate including drying time. The final product is to remain secret until the unveiling at our Lemons race in New Hampshire.
So here is the part of the story that may show the potential issue with running without a plan. We started the head before we had the truck. Unfortunately, the head we made was a bit too large for the truck. I think we had in mind a full size truck and the truck is just a wee bit smaller.
Too much? Too big?
New Truck Theme Ideas
Time for several team meetings, discussions, and minor disagreements. The clock was ticking and we either had to change plans, start over, or leave the truck theme as is and run what we brung (or bought). Our team may have a candidate for our new truck theme, but it may not be better than our last car and time is running out.
Any ideas or suggestions? I think we have agreed on a plan but maybe there is a better idea. We would love to hear from you on a potential truck theme you’d like to see us try. Even if we don’t do it now, we may on our next car or when we redo our car theme or truck theme in the future.  Thanks again for following along.
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