Diecast Masters 2019 Ford Mustang GT Custom [Commission]

Longtime readers will know this is quite off-brand for me – I don’t think I’ve ever built an American car before, let alone in 1/18 scale which I rarely work with. 1/24 JDM stuff is really my bread and butter, but it’s nice working on something different and out of my usual range every now and again – an opportunity thankfully afforded to me through commission work.

This is the client’s target car – I’ll be the first to admit my Mustang knowledge is next-to-none – all I can tell at first glance is that it’s a mostly stock last-generation Mustang. I like the bright body color, which after closer inspection is actually satin, thanks to the whole car being covered in matte PPF (per the owner).

Funnily enough, I’m not used to my clients being willing to spend for top-tier modeling – usually 1/24 scale work is much more affordable and the base models are less expensive, keeping the overall commission work cost lower. This client however, went right past all the cheap mass-produced Maitso diecast options I had sent them and straight for a top-shelf Diecast Masters model – this thing is over $200 just on its own! Not even counting the money he’s spending on the commission process.

The base model is very, very nice. This is AutoArt level stuff – we’ll see more of that as we tear it apart, but just taking it out of the box you can tell this is tiers above the usual die-cast toys you can find at Walmart or Target.

Full motor detail, with a tiny hinged metal hood prop bar that actually moves and slots into the hood to keep it up! The way the doors are hinged are also high-end – take a look at any cheap diecast model and you’ll notice the doors tend to open with big U-shaped hinges that place the front edges of the doors outside the fender (see this as an example). The hinges here are more like real car door hinges, where they open without a giant gap between the fender and door.

The frameless windows are a very nice touch – the way everything fits so snug when it’s closed feels very premium. Even the inside of the trunk and bottom of the trunk lid are flocked!

The seats fold forward and slide back and forth. I feel like such a hobo when silly little features like this impress me.

The model comes as a manual, though I’m pretty sure my client’s car is an automatic. As much as it’s going to hurt me, that third pedal is getting the sawzall.

The chassis underbody is, as expected, fully detailed. The burnt bronze exhaust pipes are a nice touch, and a good way to separate the silver of the transmission and rear subframe.

I’ve never seen any diecast with this feature – magnetic bumpers! It feels like a bit of a silly gimmick since…why would you ever want to take the bumpers off? There’s not even radiator detail or anything behind it? But for a modeler this is a very welcome feature – if only because it makes disassembling the body so easy.

The fenders are also magnetic, though they are also held in place by additional screws through the radiator support, so they don’t just pop off without tools the way the front and rear bumpers do.

This isn’t quite as simple as the usual unscrew two phillips heads from the chassis plate and take the body shell off – this thing comes apart much like a real car.

It’s kind of hard to make out in this picture, but it’s amusing to me that there’s superglue residue on the photo-etched brake disk pieces after the wheels come off. Even these high-end models are truly built the same way we do things at home.

Hilariously, the passenger door panel just fell off on its own out of the box. Guess they forgot to add glue to this piece?

Taking the engine apart in layers and look what’s under the strut bar – this thing has adjustable front camber out of the box?? There are two slots on the top of the strut towers – you can loosen the phillips head connecting the top of the strut and bring the top in if desired. The crazy thing is this model didn’t come with an info or instruction manual – so I’m literally only finding out about all these little gimmicks because I’m taking the whole thing apart for a custom job.

This is how they achieve the sliding seats gimmick – just a screw through a small rail in the chassis. The screw holding the seats in isn’t tightened all the way to allow for the movement, though I suppose you could just torque them down to lock the seats in place.

Lots of tiny screws holding every little bit in place – the whole thing comes apart in layers like an onion.

The front subframe is all metal, which is very cool, and of course it has real springs and shocks that actually travel for its suspension.

What isn’t held in by screws is held by some clear gel-like glue. It isn’t traditional superglue – thankfully it’s easy enough to pry and remove without damaging parts.

Spoiler removed from the trunk lid since my client’s car doesn’t have this particular style wing.

Even the hood vents are paper-thin metal photo-etched parts, the same stuff you’d see in aftermarket PE kits for 1/24 models.

Unfortunately the only major body panel I couldn’t take apart was the hood – since it’s held on completely with tiny rivets, I didn’t want to irreparably drill them out. Check out those hood hinges though – they have slots in the windshield base frame for the hinges to tuck into when closed.

Completely disassembled. I was most worried about how the windows would come out, since I know some companies don’t make them very removal-friendly. Thankfully they’re all just press-in from the outside here, held in by glue with thin bezels on the body to keep them from falling in.

Now that we’re here, you might be wondering – why did we have to go this far anyway? The model already came in nearly the same color as the client’s car (the client claimed the model paint is actually his exact paint code already), and there aren’t any major body modifications really needed since the target car is mostly stock anyway.

This is the main reason – the model paint errs more towards yellow than orange, and the finish has a nice subtle metallic flake. My customer’s car is completely covered in matte PPF, meaning no matter what we would’ve had to topcoat the car matte at a bare minimum to achieve the same finish.

I’m also not convinced the original model’s paint was an exact color code match to the real car – it’s hard to tell this sort of thing in photos only, but from all the reference images my client sent me of his car, his paint is very much more orange than yellow in most conditions. Maybe it’s the matte PPF making it look darker?

Because of the subtle color difference, I’m still opting to strip the whole thing and repaint it from scratch anyway – we’ve come this far after all.

As usual, Klean Strip paint stripper makes short work of any paint

Down to metal! The skirts and mirrors are plastic, so we can’t strip those the same way – the Klean Strip is so strong that it’ll melt anything that isn’t metal.

Primed first with a light coat of automotive filler primer (it tends to work better for diecast bodies, I don’t use filler primer often for plastic bodies since the details tend to be more shallow and the primer too thick) before a follow-up coat of white Tamiya fine surface primer.

Repainted with Tamiya TS-56 Brilliant Orange. Haters will say it looks the same >:T

Some light color sanding to smooth the finish a bit before another few color coats. The filler primer does well in filling the fine scratches on the diecast body and providing good base adhesion, but it’s also so high-build that it’s often difficult to get a smooth glassy gloss finish out of the color coat as a trade-off. The good thing is that I don’t have to work as hard to achieve that here, since the final finish is going to be semi-gloss/satin anyway.

Painting in small body details like the inner door sills by hand

My client’s car also sports a gloss black roof – thankfully an easy shape to mask

Body finished with Tamiya TS-79 Semi-Gloss Clear. The finish came out exactly as I had hoped – it has a very nice satin sheen that emulates the look of the PPF on the real car. I knew straight-up matte topcoat would end up making it look too flat – despite my client calling his PPF finish matte.

A comparison with the semi-gloss Brilliant Orange finish compared to the original paint. The details matter, dammit!

Doors, bumpers, and fenders all finished in semi-gloss.

Filling the original trunk spoiler holes with Bondo

Funnily enough, I probably could have skipped this step, since I only realized after that my client does in fact have a small trunk spoiler – it’s just so low profile that I completely overlooked it at first and thought he just had a standard flat trunk. The spoiler he has is going to cover these holes anyway, but whatever – now they’re filled for extra immersion!

Masking the black on the bottom of the skirts – we’re just going to paint the Brilliant Orange directly over the existing paint here.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to remove the mirror lenses from the housings. They seemed to just be chrome plastic inserts, but the tolerance was so tight that I couldn’t wedge a blade or tweezers in there to take them out without completely destroying them in the process. I decided to just leave them in and paint the whole unit Brilliant Orange – I’ll just fill in the chrome with Molotow Liquid Chrome later

Does it feel silly having to do all this masking work just to repaint something that was already painted out of the box? Yes.

Thankfully, there’s not too much work to be done for the interior – the only real difference from my customer car’s interior to the original model is some carbon fiber trim he has on the dash, and a unique S550 badge.

The original dash trim is a textured silver – using my old masking tape and trace trick to get the shape I need first for some carbon fiber decal work

Once I have the shape on tape, I trace it again onto the decal. I don’t have true 1/18 carbon fiber on hand, but 1/20 scale is close enough to be negligible.

Another minor difference is that the model dashboard has two climate vents in the center stack and two gauge pods in between them. My client’s dash has three climate vents in the center instead – a change like this would pretty much require printing a whole new dashboard, so my workaround for that is to just cover the center gauge pods with carbon, to give it a blanked out look.

My client has a custom badge on his dash plaque area, which I went ahead and threw together in Photoshop in order to print it as a decal. Is this a lot of work for a tiny 1mm tall decal that’ll barely be seen on the final product? Yes, but it’s the details that matter…right? right??

Also custom designing the client’s license plate. Thankfully the plate itself was easily generated via some online custom plate generators.

All of this car’s markings and badges printed as home-grown custom water slide decals, with a run-of-the-mill inkjet printer. The size of the dash badge and rear Cobra badge were so minuscule that my poor printer had trouble really picking out the fine details – they’re not super sharp and crisp, but it gets the overall look across.

Now, for the wheels – my client has a set of matte gunmetal Ferrada FR6s all around. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any aftermarket parts provider who makes these wheels or anything similar in design in 1/18 scale. ZoomOn models does have Forgedstar F14s available which are nearly identical design-wise, but only in 1/24 scale.

So since we can’t just purchase a set of wheels, we’ll have to improvise, adapt, overcome – surprisingly, there are lots of 3D files available of Forgestar F14 wheels (none for actual Ferrada FR6s, ironically). I ended up downloading a 3D file of these Forgestars and put out a call to see if any local 3D printers could print these from scratch for me.

The initial results were…not encouraging. With how ubiquitous 3D printing has become recently, it was strangely difficult to find someone who could print at the scale required. I knew going in there was a reason why all the aftermarket model parts I buy from all my suppliers are printed in resin, yet almost every printer I scouted still insisted that they could print at this scale with traditional FDM printing – you can see the unfortunate results.

Thankfully, I finally did end up finding someone who was able to produce the desired results – check these out! These are straight resin prints, no additional sanding or finishing – gorgeously crisp.

Wrapped in some random 1/18 tires I had laying around that happened to fit

That’s the stuff. Luckily it seems I’ve now found a reliable and quality custom resin parts print provider for all my future needs too.

Diecast Masters’ brake setup is quite nice – the rotors are their own separate piece that can freely spin, not attached to the calipers, which are secured to the inner wheel hub the way they would be on a real car. However, the calipers that came out of the box were surprisingly not very detailed, so I’m replacing them with a set of resin BBK units.

These calipers are from TK Diecast – I had bought them years ago for a 1/18 project that I never finished, so luckily the parts can still serve some purpose here. See how much more detailed and larger the aftermarket calipers are compared to the stock ones.

Calipers painted the same orange as the body, with the custom COYOTE decals added to each one. Luckily most of the decal application surfaces are light, with most of the decals going on being black – home-grown water slides can’t print white, so if this car were inverted with orange markings on a black body, I’d have a much more difficult time.

Thankfully there isn’t any major work needed for the motor – the main difference from the model is that my client isn’t running the 5.0 engine cover underneath his strut bar – he has the bananas exposed, with an aftermarket cone filter intake instead of the stock airbox.

Ordered a set of 1/18 resin intake cones from Hobby Design

Since there’s wiring and all that connected to the base of the stock intake arm, I opted to mess with the overall piece as little as possible in order to create the CAI – I just chopped the stock airbox arm off at the accordion folds and added in a piece of folded pla-plate

With the pla-plate as the underlying structure, I added some Bondo to fill the gaps and smooth the transition from the stock intake arm to my scratch-built extension

Smoothed out, painted, and cone filter stuck on the end – instant +10hp! Strut bar was also detailed up a bit with some metallic red brackets

For the wing, I was initially dreading having to build it from scratch, but after doing a double take, I realized that my client’s little trunk spoiler was actually pretty much the same overall shape as the wing that came with the model out of the box – it was just flat and low-profile on the trunk deck instead of raised with risers. This made my job a lot easier – I just went in with a heat knife and chopped the wing stands off of the original wing.

I then heated the ends with a heat gun to bend them up and make the whole thing flat – some minor trimming and sanding and that’s all it takes!

As we got to the finish line, I found that I really wasn’t fond of the door windows – something about the way they looked closed just felt off, and the clear plastic felt too thick to be in proper scale. The doors were also very difficult to open with them in place, since the only way to really do so is to wedge a toothpick under the door or pull it from the door handle, which always made me nervous in case the handle broke off. With all this in mind, I decided to just delete the side windows completely – they’d be “rolled down” on the finished model.

My client also has pretty dark tint all around sans his windshield on his windows, so I went ahead and used some Testors smoke enamel on the rear quarters and rear windshield for that extra bit of accuracy.

I think I figured out what made the side windows look so wonky when they’re closed – Diecast Masters never bothered to paint the window edging in! I never gave it a second thought since I expected a model of this quality to come out of the box as accurate as possible, but after going back and forth with reference photos of my client’s car, I realized that like most cars, the Mustang does have exterior black weather stripping around its windows.

This would have a been a lot easier to mask and paint on the body shell had I realized this sooner, but now that the whole thing is nearly put back together, I’m opting to just paint the weather stripping in by hand with a brush and acrylic paint. I still can’t believe Diecast Masters left this body color out of the box.

Finally, attaching the wheels – I would’ve liked to keep the active suspension and rolling wheels if possible, but my client’s car is too low to keep the model suspension functional (the control arms literally just do not travel far up enough), meaning I had to grind down the attachment pegs on the inner wheel hubs so I could position the brake hubs higher up for the proper fitment.

The original wheels were attached via tiny screws behind the center caps, which allowed them to spin. Unfortunately, you can see the result of me trying to replicate that function with the aftermarket resin wheels (don’t worry, this is a 5th extra wheel I had printed precisely to experiment on). The center cap bore on the resin wheels is smaller than the stock wheels, meaning I can’t fit the screw in there without destroying the lugnut openings.

So, the final solution is to just glue the wheels and hubs in fixed, as I usually do for my 1/24 scale cars. Anything for that sick fitment!

Did I do it? Did we get close?

I suddenly have a heightened appreciation for Mustangs.

Ironically, I think I slightly undersized the wheels – I had just assumed they were 19’s, but looking at the model compared to the real car, it seems like my client’s wheels may actually be 20’s. I had totally forgotten to ask for the real size specs before ordering the custom prints.

I think it looks better with the slightly more squatted stance on smaller wheels, but that’s just my style overall, with both my model cars and my real cars – I’ll almost always prefer smaller wheels since it lets you get lower overall.

I’m also only realizing now looking at the photo set that the right rear wheel is a bit askew, with some positive camber – oops. This will be fixed before the model is shipped out to my client. I knew I should’ve invested in that scale alignment machine!

Glad I went with the windows down look, it looks much better with the doors open, and you can see more of the detailed interior overall. I wasn’t kidding about chopping that clutch off.

Full burst mode!

Happy with the way the engine bay turned out, even though it really was just some minor adjustments here and there.

A cute little quirk – the box for this model is very nice – printed to look like a shipping container, in matching colors to the car. Makes for a neat little prop in photos.

Inside the box also comes a very cool folding diorama board, with a little workshop printed that you can display the model on.

My main gripe with the model overall are the egregious panel gaps – particularly for the rear bumper and hood/fenders. I tried adjusting them as much as I could, but there’s really no room to fix anything since it’s all keyed to line up the way it does out of the box.

I’m pretty sure this is a direct result of Diecast Masters insisting on the magnetic fenders and bumpers gimmick – if those panels weren’t designed to be easily removable, I think they could’ve gotten better and tighter tolerances for each of the panels, but alas.