Fresh off of my last Skyline rebuild, it’s time to tear into my first A90 Supra and give it another go.
This feels like a fairly recent kit, but looking back on it, I had built my first A90 all the way back in early 2020, nearly four years ago now. I think this was right around when Tamiya first came out with their Supra kit, and Fugu Garage was the first aftermarket producer to make a resin widebody for it.
I was really never happy with how this build turned out – the widebody fitment was abysmal, my panel lines were messy, the final paint finish had discolorations on large panels like the hood – I had just poured too much time and effort into it for a final result that I felt was very far below my usual standards.
So, fast forward a few years later and other aftermarket producers have had time to develop different transkits for this model – I figured now would be as good as time as ever to have another crack at it.
I really never liked the original Pandem kit that much anyway – it was just the only widebody available at the time, so if I wanted a non-stock body Supra, that was the only way. Bless ZoomOn Models for releasing a transkit of the StreetHunters kit, which I do think is one of the best looking kits for this platform full stop.
While I could build a whole new Supra from the ground up with the new kit and transkit, remember I don’t like having duplicate cars in my collection, so if I’m building a new one the old one will be decommissioned anyway. For that reason I’ll primarily be rebuilding the body from the ground up, and keeping the chassis and interior of my original A90 mostly intact as it was.
ZoomOn’s transkit is very comprehensive – it includes a full set of wheels with metal barrels/lips, the resin body kit itself, a full photoetched detail-up set, and even decals to replicate TJ Hunt’s StreetHunter A90 when it was wrapped orange with the Fast and Furious throwback livery.
The widebody itself is really just four pieces. The rear flares are molded together with the side skirts. Those tabs on the edges of each piece are not pegs or alignment tabs – it’s just resin flash that needs to be trimmed off.
I was really, really hoping ZoomOn would get it right and this kit wouldn’t be a fitment nightmare the way Fugu Garage’s Pandem transkit was. I got my hopes up.
If you notice in the first photo of the widebody parts earlier, the side skirt portions were very clearly bent upwards right out of the box. I thought at first that maybe they were meant to swoop upwards to meet the front flares, but after trying them on the body, that was clearly not the case. The skirts didn’t match the flow of the body flank at all, and of course they didn’t meet up flush with the front flares. My solution to this, as I’ve done before, was to take a heat gun and heat the resin parts until they were just soft enough for me to bend them straight.
Heating and bending the skirts worked enough for me to massage the rear flares on, but check this out – if we’re to follow the panel gap line of the hood to line up the front flares, it doesn’t work whatsoever.
Okay fine, so let’s just line the panel up to the door line. Now the hood panel line isn’t even remotely close to the line on the original body!
The skirts and front overfender are also supposed to flow into each other as one line, as seen here. This was only achieved after hours of massaging both the skirts and fenders with a heat gun to get them to line up relatively close, and even afterwards I had to sand them down pretty significantly to get the step gap even and flush.
All four fender arches were also slightly off in their radius, so of course there was more heating and bending to try to get them to circle the wheel openings evenly. Despite my best efforts, stuff like this was still present – judging by the sample product photos, the bumper skirt portion of the rear arch is supposed to cover the inner portion of the stock bumper completely, basically overlaying it and creating another layer. Unfortunately, to get the rear bumper line to line up, there was always a bit of the stock bumper sticking out and showing underneath the overfender skirt.
My solution was to just go at the stock body with a heat knife and cut portions of the rear bumper and original fenders out, so only the widebody portions would be showing.
Because of the whole fiasco with the front flare hood gap line not lining up even remotely close to the stock line, I decided to just fill in those panel lines and rivet divots with body filler, deleting them entirely. The rivet divots on the front overfender are placed around the hood gap line, so if that line is off, it throws all the rivet divots off too. I said to hell with it, we’ll just forsake any external hardware and make this a semi-molded widebody. It looks cleaner like that anyway.
I have to admit, for all my whining, bitching, and moaning, fitting this widebody was still easier than fitting Fugu Garage’s Pandem widebody. But come on, is it so much to ask for a widebody transkit for an A90 to just fit out of the box?!
I really took my time to prep the body prior to paint – I went in and re-scribed all the panel gap lines deeper in order to make sure the details will still pop even after multiple coats of paint and decal work. I learned my lesson with the Skyline I built last month, when the panel lines became filled and lost after so many coats of paint and decals covering them.
I may be ditching the Top Secret livery, but we’re still going with gold. My very specific vision for this build required a particular shade of gold that leaned closer to orange rather than yellow. Tamiya didn’t quite have exactly the color I was looking for out of their TS-series of sprays that I usually use, so I turned to Testors. Longtime readers will know I don’t usually like Testors for anything, but in this case I decided to give their color a shot since it was advertised as a lacquer instead of their usual enamel stuff, which takes forever to dry and is hard to work with. This lacquer behaves just like Tamiya’s sprays.
19 inch TE037 wheels with rubber tires sourced from Fugu Garage. I’ll dunk on their transkit quality all day long, but you can’t deny they do make some crisp wheels.
To be honest these wheels are kind of boring for a widebody like this – really I would normally be taking every opportunity I can get to go for the deepest dishes I could fit under those flares, but we’re sticking with this relatively basic six-spoke look for a reason.
And here’s that reason. My vision for this project was to recreate the look of a Hot Wheels car from the 2005 animated film series Acceleracers – specifically Synkro, driven by one of the main characters in the series. I’ve been doing a lot of Acceleracers related projects lately, from the 1:18 Deora IIs I’ve been building on commission for clients to adding more and more Acceleracers themed merchandise to the site shop.
I’m not trying to recreate Synkro one-to-one as an exact replica of the car as it appeared in the movies. The idea is to just take the design inspiration and overall look and apply it to a real modified car, in this case my StreetHunters A90.
Of course a critical part of the design will be the unique blue dragon livery that adorns the sides of the movie car. Enter TK Diecast, who helped me produce these custom decal sheets with custom vectored artwork created from whatever references we could find online.
I always like to double or triple my custom decal requests when I order them just to give me extra breathing room in case I mess up a first or second attempt, especially for something as large as this livery that needs to go over and around so many curves on the body.
With the key parts of the livery done that match the Hot Wheels design, I knew I would end up having to fill some design gaps on the Supra, since the body will be different than the original Synkro. The original car has a turbo sticking out of the hood and a top-mount intercooler cutout further back on the hood, which I didn’t particularly want to replicate on this curbside Supra, so I’m filling in the rest of the blank space on the hood with my own design interpretations.
While the source car has the roof and wing matched to the body color, I thought it would still look better overall with some carbon fiber to break it all up. I’m using masking tape to trace out the shape of the roof, which I can then peel off and transfer to a carbon fiber decal sheet to cut out the exact shape I need to fill this area with.
It took me like 4 tries to get the overlay correct, since you have to be very patient and delicate massaging out the creases and air bubbles with shapes and large decals like this. Think of it like wrapping a real car, except it’s like using toilet paper, since the decal is so delicate and rips easily if your fingers aren’t constantly wetted or if you happen to push or pinch too hard.
Wheels painted a very basic silver with a dap of gloss red paint to mimic the look of the iconic Acceleracers red center caps.
I liked the interior as it was, but the red roll cage, maroon interior accents, and green belts just weren’t going to flow with the new body color and theme, so we’re tearing it out just to change the colors.
I actually went back and rewatched Ignition to check the scenes of Nolo racing Tork on the cliffside, since that showed the best details of Synkro‘s interior as it appeared in the films. It looked like most of the interior accents were body-matched orange, with of course the neon blue lighting that’s so iconic of TEKU cars. I thought the metallic gold flake of the body color would be too egregious to use on the interior pieces, so I just opted to paint them with a similar Tamiya orange instead.
Synkro didn’t have a roll cage or roll bar in Acceleracers, but I worked too hard to make that Studio RSR replica cage from scratch and I’ll be damned if it goes to waste, so I painted it blue with every intention of sticking it back in.
Since the green Takata harnesses were glued to the original Bride seats, we’ll be doing away with those entirely and replacing the seats with these Braum resin printed replicas courtesy of Eternity Hobby Supply.
Painted the same orange as the rest of the interior trim.
Masked to paint the seat inserts dark blue.
We have racing buckets and we have a roll cage, so of course harnesses are next. In-series, Synkro is shown to have black belts with white pads with the TEKU lettering on them. My close approximation here is to just go with white harnesses.
This seat belt kit I’m using actually isn’t meant for a four-point harness system – it’s just supposed to replicate normal three-point seatbelts, so it doesn’t technically come with the photo-etched buckle sets to recreate a four-point system. Good thing I have a ton of leftover PE buckle parts I can cannibalize from.
Not the most detailed harnesses I’ve ever built, but I didn’t give max effort on these since they won’t be seen too much under the coupe body anyway.
And that’s the interior wrapped up. Didn’t have to actually do too much work this time aside from recoloring what was there already and replacing a set of seats and harnesses.
Tamiya provided window masking stickers, as they usually do with most of their modern kits.
I’m being extra lazy and just reusing the tail and headlight units from the last Supra body, since the headlights are actually one of the most complex parts of this kit, with multiple clear parts making up each housing unit.
Getting to some of the smaller miscellaneous body parts, like the gloss black A-pillar covers, the body-color matched door handles and mirrors, and of course the factory rear diffuser, which I’m keeping gloss black this time instead of wrapping it in carbon as I did for the Top Secret version of this car.
ZoomOn doesn’t provide any actual instructions for their transkit, aside from like a placement guide for the photo-etched metal parts – the rest of it is supposed to be fairly intuitive, I think. It took me a minute to figure out that the widebody kit is meant for you to keep the stock lip piece – but with the winglet edges trimmed, since it would collide with the front overfenders otherwise.
I made the cuts to the winglets entirely by eyeballing it.
I was originally going to paint the gigantic front lip piece gloss black as it’s usually done for this kit, but figured I might as well get some more mileage out of this body color, since it’s fairly uncommon.
Wrapping up the decal work on the body – even going out of my way to trace and cut out exact carbon decal bits for the wing endplate inserts.
So much happier with this final product than I was with the original Top Secret version.
Right as I was fitting everything together, I realized that for some reason the front lip feels so much wider than the rest of the car – makes it feel like it has a giant underbite, especially when you see how much further out the lip flares on the sides than the sideskirts.
Even in ZoomOn’s sample photos out of the box, the sideskirts are supposed to be the same width overall as the front lip. I’m 90% sure this is a byproduct of the weird molding with the sideskirts, and how I had to heat them to form them up to the body.
I thought this would bother me a lot more than it does with the final product – I’m actually very happy with how the transkit came together, pulled in sideskirts or not.
Notice how there’s just no panel line between the rear of the hood and lower fender anymore since I filled it in lol. But I kept the front hoot panel line, sooooo it’s a clamshell now?!
The extra time and effort I took to re-scribe and deepen the original bodylines really paid off. I’m especially happy with the rear bumper-to-fender line.
The build as a whole doesn’t feel as impactful as the original Top Secret version, given the smaller not-chassis-mounted wing and no more super deep dish wheels, but I do really enjoy the clean street car look.
Translating Acceleracers designs to real car designs is always an interesting process to me. Hot Wheels designs tend to be much more squished when you really try to scale them up – the windows are typically smaller, the extremities like wings and wheels are usually much larger than they would be in real life – so naturally with such caricatured car designs the livery designs won’t always translate well without a little adaptation.
In this case, Synkro’s original dragon side livery did a lot of the heavy lifting for the sides of the car – I just added a few extra sponsor decals here and there to tie it all together. The main piece I knew I had to add was the big TEKU team logo text on the right side of the hood, since without it it felt like there was too much empty plain blank space – especially given how massive the Supra’s hood panel is.
We got pretty close, right?
