Month: July 2011

Both RC vehicles are still out of commission, waiting for parts. So I decided to paint the new body RC8 body I had ordered a month ago. I didn’t really need it, since the green cover it came with was perfectly functional… but since I was getting back into the hobby after 15 years, and since it was a used RC, I wanted to do something to make it feel a bit more like mine. And I really wanted to try painting again, since I had only done it once before long long ago for my Traxxas Sledgehammer.

After a lot of Googling I had a basic idea of how I wanted to paint it. Complicated designs are nice, but I needed something I could mask off with relatively straight bits of masking tape. The fewer corners I needed to learn to trim with a hobby knife, the better. After a few rough drawings I had a basic idea:

Here’s the first pass: using green painters masking tape and some newspaper to lay down the center and side stripes (which will be white), then the secondary center stripes and side pods (which will be silver), then covering up everything else (which will be purple) to only expose the 3 vent mouldings in the body:

Here’s the vents painted black, then the first layer of paper and tape removed to show the areas to be spray-painted translucent purple:

Here’s after the purple was put on:

Then I took off the masking for the side pods and secondary center stripes and put on the silver:

Finally I removed the center and side stripes and added the white (then took out the masks on the windows too):

Then added a couple decals:

And the final result on the car!

I screwed up the purple a bit (put it on too thick) and didn’t mask the black off properly, but I’m really happy with the results! I’m going to put the buggy tires back on the RC8 when I run this new cover, since the larger truck tires tend to rub the body and rip it (the green body already has several cracks in it). Maybe I’ll do a nice shiny new cover for the Stampede next!

…you’re on camera!

My first attempt at mounting my helmetcam to my RC truck didn’t work so well: it was velcro’d to the flexible body and shook around too much. This time I screwed together some 3/8″ dowels and other scrap wood to attach the camera to the frame, by spanning the front and rear body mounts.

The camera pokes a bit farther through the windshield now (so it records less of the hood) but it’s held on with elastic bands… so if it gets hit it can slide back into the body:

The video was better, but still very choppy. It’s never going to be perfectly smooth when the truck is flying across a lumpy lawn on little 5″ wheels. So I also washed the video though a VirtualDub plugin called “Deshaker“, then played with cropping and resizing the video to get this second demo clip:

Deshaker nudges the video frames in various directions to try to stabilize the image, but it leaves black bars around the edge to the scene (i.e. if it moves a scene a bit to the left to remove a shake, it backfills an empty black section on the right of the screen). So raw Deshaker processed video has black bars dancing around all 4 sides of the screen as it tries to stabilize the image, which is distracting. To get rid of the worst of it I cropped the 1280×720 video down to 1030×580 (so I lost a bit of my peripheral vision), then resampled the result back up to 1280×720 again. The resulting video is a bit less crisp… but a lot less shakey!