Yet another Evora! This will have been my third Evora built in as many years, including my own that started first with a Bburago model. At this rate Lotus should just hire me as the official customer car replicator, it’s becoming a business all on its own now (sorry 400/GT owners, there’s a reason why I only build S1s – your bumpers were never made in 1/24 scale and I don’t have a resin printer to make my own yet).
The Motor Max satin white paint casting of the S1 Evora S is the most abundantly available version of our cars on the market – hopefully it stays that way so they don’t begin to get more expensive. Thankfully the base diecast is only around $25-30 purchased on eBay. No model manufacturer actually makes a proper 1/24 Evora model kit, which is why we’re stuck still stripping and repainting diecast models.
Satin paint is ew. Weird that Motor Max decided to make the headlight housings silver, when they were always black on every Evora model.
Two screws out of the underbody and the chassis separates from the body. The wheels never had any sort of steering mechanism; both front and rear are connected by single metal axles. Interior is all plain black plastic.
So, this is the target to achieve. My customer car is an early model S1 Evora just like mine, though his is the more powerful supercharged S version – the only exterior difference from factory on the S compared to my NA model is the more aggressive rear diffuser. He’s got quite a few mods on the car differentiating it quite a bit from a stock example, among the most prominent being the aftermarket wheels, wing, splitter aero, and replacement louvered rear hatch.
Starting by stripping the main body of the original paint. I do enjoy working with diecast bodies every now and again compared to my usual work with just plastic and resin, since you can use much harsher chemicals on metal bodies and not have to worry about melting or disfiguring them. I’m just using a standard industrial grade gel paint stripper here that you can find off the shelf at Home Depot – brush this stuff on and you’ll start to see the paint bubble and peel off within a few hours.
Stripped and lightly sanded for some surface prep. The only non-metal part of the body was the stock rear wing, which I tossed since my customer car has an aftermarket unit anyway.
My customer’s car has a full replacement trunk lid with an integrated duckbill. Unfortunately, there aren’t exactly quick and easy resin replacement parts for a model like this, so I’m left having to sculpt the shape out myself with some trusty ‘ol Bondo body filler.
The rear glass was originally attached to the rest of the window unit that included the small rear quarter windows and the main front windshield, but since my customer car’s replacement hatch deleted the rear window and replaces it with a louvered carbon vent, I cut the window off from the rest of it and integrated it into the body while I was doing the Bondo work.
The duckbill isn’t as aggressive as I would’ve liked for it to be, but the overall shape is there, and building out more Bondo to sculpt the shape was getting more and more difficult as it built outwards.
After a quick primer check to make sure my Bondo work was smooth, I went on to draw the lines I’d have to cut in the plastic rear window to create the louver vents in the hatch.
Really wondering if there was a better way to do this. After marking my lines, I cut the openings with a heat knife, then slowly sanded and filed away at it until it was (mostly) straight and even, though even after a lot of clean-up work, it still feels messy. I’m wondering if maybe a high-speed Dremel disk would’ve gotten me cleaner and straighter cuts, but I also worry that would’ve just melted the plastic into chunks.
Moving onto the interior – Motor Max barely gives you any detail here, but there is a wiggle stick! We’ll be cutting that out since my customer car is an IPS (Intelligent Pro Shift or something) model (Lotus-speak for automatic).
The original seats included in the Motor Max model feel like they haven’t been unlocked in the game yet. I picked up another set of Recaro Sportsters from ZoomOn Models to give it a bit more detail.
The only tiny bit of detail in the interior Motor Max included was a single sticker that wrapped around the steering column on the dash – covering the gauge cluster gauges and the infotainment screen. We’ll make use of that, but I’m also pillaging one of the old Lotus centercap stickers for the steering wheel badge, since I don’t have Lotus decals on hand.
Headlight housing painted flat black with chrome added by hand to bring out the projectors.
Sportsters painted semi-gloss black to replace the look of my customer car’s black leather interior. The included seat rails that the seats will mount to are painted flat black for some contrast.
Cut a small piece of pla-plate out and painted it flat black to replace the look of the IPS shift control panel on the center console. This will cover up the hole where the shifter stalk was.
Interior done. Not too much to it since my customer’s interior is just black leather, though I did still go out of my way to repaint all the black plastic to semi-gloss black to give it a more leather-y look.
Just as I did with the last Evora commission I built, I’m cutting out the textured plastic insert that Motor Max uses as the front “grille” piece – we’ll be placing real mesh behind the bumper for a more authentic look than this dull bit of plastic.
Back to the main body – first coat of Tamiya Camel Yellow down.
Masked to spray the roof and side skirts gloss black, then gunmetal for the rear hatch as the base coat before I apply carbon decals.
The deep Camel Yellow and black top half of the car is very pleasing – I enjoy my high contrast sports cars. This Evora owner has taste.
The section between the rear engine hatch lid and the gloss black roof is referred to by Lotus as the “sail panel” – that vaguely U-shaped piece with the four molded-in vents. This panel usually comes as gloss black on stock Evoras, though it seems my customer had replaced it with a carbon fiber replacement panel to match the carbon fiber louvered engine lid.
This means everything you see above in gunmetal will have to be wrapped in carbon decals – of course as usual, I’m tracing the shape out with masking tape first.
The shape traced on the tape is then applied to the back of a carbon fiber decal sheet, in this case a twill weave sheet in 1/20 scale from Scale Motorsport. I do have 1/24 sheets available, but find that the slightly larger 1/20 weave shows up better and doesn’t look egregiously out of scale. Actual 1/24 weave is so fine that it’s basically impossible to tell it’s carbon unless you get really close up to it. I’m putting all this effort into wrapping so much of this car in carbon, I want it to be visible, damnit!
The dip in the rear hatch is a compound curve – the worst kind to get smooth and right with decal wrap. Took over an hour of slowly smoothing and stretching the carbon decal at the bottom of the curve to get it completely laid. I used to rely a lot on heat to push the water and air out and stretch the decal forcibly, but I’ve since learned there’s really no shortcuts to a process like this – you just have to take your time and slowly work it until it’s completely flat. Being able to cut the exact shape of the decal out with the masking tape process aids in this massively.
My customer’s car also seems to have a replacement front access hatch in carbon, so we’re following the same process here again.
My customer’s actual Evora is wearing a set of silver Fifteen52 Chicanes – unfortunately while most of my usual aftermarket parts suppliers didn’t seem to have Chicanes available, I did happen to stumble on ZoomOn Models with a listing for a set of OZ Racing wheels that are pretty much the exact same design. I never really put any thought into whether Fifteen52 was a rep wheel brand or not, but it seems like their Chicane model was taken straight from these original OZ designs.
Painted Tamiya Mica Silver. The hex center caps were removable for easy painting too!
Center caps painted semi-gloss black, with a little chrome detail added by hand with some Molotow Liquid Chrome on the outer edge ring.
The ZoomOn wheel set didn’t come with tires, but I have plenty of spare tires laying around in my parts bin that’ll fit 18-19″ wheels. I was originally going to go with a fairly normal thin sidewall set, but after test fitting against the body, it just didn’t look right, so I switched to much thinner stretched set of Aoshima tires.
The original Motor Max model didn’t even bother including any sort of brakes (I really can’t complain when it was a $25 mass produced toy), so we’re adding that detail ourselves with some random brakes dug out of the spare parts bin. Surprisingly, I didn’t have a full set of matching rotors/calipers on-hand, so we’re making do with some slight mis-match front and rear.
Brakes glued in to the original pegs that came with the ZoomOn wheels. These will then be directly glued onto the chassis, no metal axle rods here.
Now for the wing…my customer’s car is wearing a unique aftermarket carbon wing specifically meant for the Evora, so you can imagine for such a niche car and accessory there isn’t going to be any 1/24 aftermarket part available for it. But that’s okay – modern problems require modern solutions. We improvise, adapt, overcome…by using a wing meant for a Toyota Hiace?!
The overall shape of the Hiace wing is actually very similar to my client’s Lotus wing – it’s even a top-mount swan neck like his is. Of course, I’m creating the stands myself from scratch out of pla-plate and adding an extra strip to the back of the wing to give it more depth.
Filling in the gaps on the extension piece with more Bondo.
Once it’s all smoothed out, I painted it in gunmetal first before getting ready to cover it all in carbon.
I’m getting better at smooth glossy carbon finishes now, and overall getting better at laying carbon decals over more complex shapes, since I’ve been working with it so much lately. Practice really does make perfect.
I did try to cut out the innards of the wing stands to make them more accurate to the hollow look of the real thing, but unfortunately just didn’t have a good way to cut out inserts at this scale on pla-plate this thick. Drilling, scribing, and cutting kept breaking the plastic, and my usual heat-knife approach would cause too much collateral damage melting the edges.
Wing endplates also created from scratch out of thinner pla-plate and covered in carbon decals. Wetsanding the clear finish very carefully with 1000 grit and polishing up to get just a bit of a glossier finish and cut out some of the orange peel from clear alone.
Wing done! This piece alone took the most effort out of any other part on this build, with over half of it being scratch-built out of pla-plate and almost entirely covered in carbon fiber decals. I won’t be mounting it on the car until the very end, to mitigate the risk of it breaking off as I’m handling the body for other final touches, like decals and final paint details.
Mesh added to the front bumper grille openings.
The original exhaust on the Motor Max model was the stock Evora mini-USB port looking single exit. My client has an aftermarket twin-tip exhaust on his car, so we’re replicating that with a plastic twin-tip piece I had laying around in my parts pin, glued to a piece of styrene pipe, all painted silver.
Aftermarket taillights created out of hollow styrene tubing, painted red and black with a black backing plate made of pla-plate. Thankfully the aftermarket taillight designs for our cars are very simple.
One rather unique design element on my client’s car is the black stripe outlining the Lotus badging on the rear bumper, between the taillights.
An oval shape this precise with the lettering centered inside would be way too difficult for me to paint by hand, so I’m resorting to my usual tricks with custom home-grown water slide decals. I literally cut the image out of a picture of my customer’s car he sent me in Photoshop and printed it directly on my homegrown water slide paper with my inkjet printer, along with a few other bits and pieces like Lotus badging and the Evora S badging that goes on the rear bumper.
At this size and scale my poor run-of-the-mill inkjet printer from 2015 is struggling to print anything clearly, but at least the general shape and colors are there. For the center caps, I’m cutting tiny pieces of styrene rod to glue into the empty holes currently in the center of the gaps, then laying the Lotus decals on top.
And finally, the last bit to build and tie it all together – the custom front splitter and side skirts from my customer car are being scratch built out of more pla-plate.
I’ve done splitters and skirts like this plenty of times before in the past, so these designs aren’t particularly complex or difficult for me to cut out and get right. I’m just glad my client has them in satin black instead of carbon fiber, makes my job so much easier when I can just hit these straight with some black paint and be done with it.
Did it work? Did we get close?
Ironically even though I tend to like smaller wheels, I think the ZoomOn OZ Racing wheels are just a tad too small for this car. I’m pretty sure my client’s actual wheels are one or two inches larger on the actual car in diameter than these 18″ I had available for the model.
I was most worried about how the modified Hiace wing would end up looking on the final model, since I really didn’t fit it proper against the body until the very end. I was constantly concerned about it looking too small or narrow, but thankfully it worked out looking just right.
Door open! A novel gimmick for me when I’m so used to building unibody plastic models, not these diecasts.
The greatest limitation of homegrown inkjet decals is that I really can’t use them over dark surfaces – traditional inkjet printers don’t print white (they rely on you printing things on…white paper), so they typically only really work when you’re trying to print a dark design to apply on a lighter surface, like the black oval stripe on the rear bumper with the LOTUS lettering.
The LOTUS lettering is only in yellow because the silver/white couldn’t print, so it comes out as clear and lays directly over the yellow rear bumper. I could have painted the section underneath in silver to bring the lettering out, but the black decal is so thin that the silver would’ve shown through the outline if I wasn’t precise, something beyond my abilities to do by hand.
Look closely and you’ll notice the right rear wheel arch also isn’t radiused completely round – it’s sort of choppy, as though it were cut unevenly with a knife. This is actually a defect from the original Motor Max mold, that I unfortunately didn’t notice or catch until after the body was completely done (as I was fitting the wheels and wondering why the wheels were round and the wheel arch wasn’t). Oh the woes of mass-produced diecasts.
My client’s car is very bold and in-your-face styling wise though, which translates really well to a model – being able to hit all the big key points like the wing, color, wheels, and custom aero lends it a lot of resemblance at first glance, as nitpicky as I am about all the small details I couldn’t replicate. Overall one of my favorite commission builds I’ve knocked out.
Guest appearance with my original Bburago Evora built based on my own car – that doesn’t even look like that anymore :’)
