Hot Wheels custom cars

As I'm perusing the world wide weberverse, I found out about another hobby that has been doing the rounds for … oh I don't know, probably for as long as die cast cars have been around.

There are heaps of people who customise and make their own Hot Wheels (and other brand) cars, and it looks pretty nice.

I'd already seen a bunch of tutorials on how to DIY waterslide decals, so that's entirely doable. Drilling out the rivet and either gluing or tap and screwing the base back on are both things I can easily do. Stripping off the paint is likewise relatively straight forward.

The painting … that's a bit harder and not something I have much experience with. I've never used an air brush, but it looks relatively straight forward. The basic techniques at least, I'm assuming that like most things, one gets better with practice.

The down side is that a proper airbrush kit with compressor is over $150 for a basic kit. A bit out of my price range, and that's before buying paints and other things.

The good news is that if was to pick up a gravity feed air brush (as opposed to siphon type) online, they can work with relatively low air pressure - and one hack that I've seen is to use a fish tank air pump (instead of a proper compressor) and adding a 2L or 3L plastic soda bottle for a reservoir. It seems to work, and for something like painting little toy cars it could be done. Considering that we already have a spare air pump floating around, I could cobble something together to run a little $20 air brush gun.

Would the results be good? Probably not. But it could work as a first step approach, and a way to practice. I did have a hunt around to see if anybody was selling packs of old cars in bulk on the cheap, but everybody seems to think that every car is a hyper-collectible classic. Or they are pretty cheap listings but have $100+ postage due to coming from the US or England. Basic cars are only $2 from BigW, but it seems a waste to pull apart and strip a brand new car.

I might have to check out the flee markets or keep an eye out on the classifieds to see if there is anybody selling or giving away old cars.

Or not. We don't really have the spare money for me to be wasting it on frivolous things like this. I'll have to keep hunting and find something cheaper...