socketball's custom casts

I've always been fascinated by these trucks. They're so ostentatious in a way later tour vehicles just weren't.

What really motivated this project was an idle post on twitter asking if anyone could identify the type of truck these were. I got an answer really quickly (The answer would prove to be incorrect, but that comes later) and after some searching I was able to find there was a die cast model of this type of truck available. In UN livery of all things! After a few weeks of waffling about I finally bought it and began to plan what would become on of the most complex, and probably the most costly, projects I've attempted.

Now you might ask: "James, you've done a lot of 3d modelling, and you have a 3d printer, why not just 3d model it." and to that I'd say, my name isn't James. I'd also say that....I just am not really a "car guy". I've messed around with modelling cars before and just kept getting too in to the weeds. I knew if I started on something like that I'd easily lose weeks to seat belt clips and dashboard details.

So I decided to try moulding. One thing I really wanted out of this was to do all 6 trucks, not just one. at first I tried what I had on hand, which was this brush on silicon stuff that smells like fish. It failed completely and utterly and nearly killed this project.

So I began experimenting with proper silicon moulds. Had a lot of issues, from having to cut moulds apart because the mould release didn't work to the silicon not curing due to reacting with something I'd coated the originals with to the resulting casting being so full of bubbles it looked like something from the end of a mafia movie.

But eventually, several jugs of silicon and resin and a vacuum chamber later I was able to get repeatable acceptable castings. Also messed around a bit with colouring the resin.

By some weird coincidence all the best castings I had could all be matched up to a Toa. You wouldn't know it now since they're all hidden under several layers of paint, but I think its neat.

The paint job was a fairly basic affair. Ended up doing a lot more hand painting than I thought at first. It was quite relaxing really. A few months ago I'd suffered an arm injury that meant I couldn't hold up my left arm while painting so this project was kinda stalled for a while. Mixing up the colours to match the canister lids was quite fun.

Next came one of the more daunting parts: the decals. The most eye catching thing about these cars is that they're decked out on every surface with vibrant Bionicle vinyl wraps, and luckily due to certain water fowl related incidents at around that time there were psd files floating around that featured some of the graphics this project needed.

The fact I took so many tries to get it right proved useful here, as I had no shortage of truck bodies to experiment on. First I poured over every image I could find of the truck and marked out and numbered every decoration I could see, then I did a simple tape transfer, covered the thing in tape, drew out the decals, cut them off and scanned them, and then did the final layouts. Once I'd done the graphics design I did a couple test prints, first just in paper to test the scale, and second with the decal paper to test the transfer.

It was quite fun, but the actual process of applying the decals was incredibly stressful. These are waterslide decals printed using an inkjet printer, so I had to coat the decals in many coats of varnish and had to be really quick about applying them. The good thing with having to do 6 was if I did one part at a time by the time I finished the 6th one the first one was dry enough to move on to another part.

It was so satisfying to see them all take shape. Doing multiples of something is much harder than just a one off, but its also a more interesting challenge, you have to think much more about orders of operations and the most effective ways to accomplish something.

Early on in the project I'd really wanted to incorporate some people. In most of the photographs of these trucks they're always surrounded by groups and I wanted to capture that a bit. I searched and searched but the best in scale people I could find were these guys:

They're just so....70s? 60s? I don't know they're definitely not 2001 though. The annoying thing was also that there were only two younger boy figures there, so I had to get a two pack to at least have a couple people in the target audience.

This would go on to be a surprisingly fun part of the project. I took all the children and a couple of the younger seeming adult figures from the pack and modified them, in some cases hacking limbs off and repositioning them, adding the masks that the trucks carried that allowed people to watch videos, and giving them whole new paint jobs. This tour was in the summer months of 2001, so I felt the need to give everyone shorts and t-shirts. I did the adults up to resemble the employees seen in the photos, yellow shirts with some Bionicle logo decals I had left over from the main trucks.

And then because I was just having so much fun I went crazy and made a couple tiny folding tables and stuff to adorn them. Tiny comics, and even accurately scaled Toa canisters. They're not even 4mm tall! They were quite delicate to put together. I nearly lost one.

Around this time something Bionicle related got announced and I just had it get stuck in my head to do something, and by completely hacking up a random guy I managed to make a little Tahu boy.

And then as one final little touch I added this cardboard standee of Tahu that was seen with the trucks. This is actually a unique render of Tahu not seen anywhere else at this time. Its only one of these popping up on ebay that let me recreate it with any accuracy.

It was such a lovely feeling as the last few details came together. The little lights on the roofs of the trucks especially. They really complete the look.