1:18 100% Hot Wheels Deora II (Highway 35 Wave Rippers Custom)

In the time since I built my first 1:18 TEKU Deora II custom, I’ve made multiple copies as commissions for customers looking to own one themselves. But there was another version of this car I’ve always wanted to build at this scale – the predecessor to the TEKU livery from the movie prequel to Acceleracers – Hot Wheels Highway 35: World Race.

Absolutely iconic for those of us who grew up in the early 2000’s. This was the version of the Deora II that many of us saw on screen for the first time as wide-eyed kids, watching the first mini-episode of the World Race airing on Cartoon Network in 2003.

I’ve put off doing the Wave Rippers livery for this long because it’s actually deceptively much more complex than the TEKU version I did first. The TEKU version may seem like it has more going on, given that it has more design features on the front and rear of the car instead of it just being all blue, but most of that is just pinstriping. Masking is tedious work, but I can at least accomplish most of the TEKU livery with precision paintwork and some vectored TEKU logos – the Wave Rippers livery is going to require large, conformed custom graphics along the entire sides and top of the car.

I made the first 1:18 Deora II I ever customized out of the very toy that I had grown up playing with throughout my childhood, so now that I’m building more of these, I’m needing to buy them wherever I can find them – most often whenever they come up for auction on eBay. New and sealed ones like this are going for around $300 nowadays!

I remember begging my parents to buy me this as a wee lad for $40 back in the day. Given how these are only getting rarer and are consistently going up in value, I feel a little bad tearing into them for customs, but I take a little solace knowing I’m only making them more iconic with the liveries many fans know this car for in the first place.

I’ve opened enough of these by now to see that most of them have unfortunate marring on their paint from the rubber bands used to hold the front hatch closed in the box. Not surprising considering these are often completely untouched in-box for over 20 years by now.

I’m not going to go over the disassembly for the base model again in detail – you can read all about that here during my first TEKU livery build of this car.

Into the acid bath it goes

After stripping the original metallic blue we repaint it…metallic blue again?!

Longtime readers will know I love this particular color – I’ve used it to approximate Subaru World Rally Blue and Bayside Blue on multiple kits in the past, to the point where it’s likely my most consistently used body color on most of my models. In this case, it approximates well for Wave Rippers blue, albeit slightly darker as I applied it over a gloss black base coat this time so it isn’t as bright as Subaru blue. It is, in fact, darker than the original metallic blue that the original model was wearing.

With the base color down, we can jump right into the decal work – once again, I’ve turned to my usual custom decal supplier TK Diecast for help custom designing these graphics specifically to work with the 1:18 version of this model. The logo designs like the Wave Rippers and Highway 35 logos were all vectored for higher resolution prints at this scale, while the wave designs were all created using stock images of waves and oceans, since I couldn’t find any textures or scans of the original livery in high-enough definition that would’ve looked good at this larger scale.

Tackling the big one first – the side graphic always made me the most nervous, from design to print to finally application here – I really don’t know if this will work out and even look correct, given the wave design itself is a complete custom creation after some creative photoshopping of an actual photograph of a wave.

I ironically had oversized it a bit, and miscalculated the angle of the front portion that leads into the white stripe coming off the headlights. It’s supposed to turn down at a much steeper angle at the front wheel arch than what I had it printed at, but luckily I can make some cut adjustments to fix that on the spot

Because of the oversizing, the actual “curve” of the wave itself is lost beneath the skirts, but I think the overall design language is still there – hopefully no one will notice once the logos are on

TK Diecast’s superbly strong decal quality is a double-edged sword – on one hand it’s reassuring to know that they don’t tear easily at all, so I can massage the decals around with nearly dry fingers and not have to worry about breaking them the way I do for most others – but on the flip side, the fact that they’re so strong also means they’re tougher to cut, to the point where even fresh blades are sometimes pulling on the decal instead of cutting straight through, sometimes messing up the placement as a result.

But another advantage to that decal strength – they can be heated and stretched quite a bit more than most other decals I’ve worked with, allowing me to slowly massage the graphics into the side intake vain. This was the part of this project that intimidated me the most – I knew from the very beginning it would be a tedious and difficult process to get the graphic to lay right and conform over the flank intakes. In the end, it took nearly an hour of slowly pressing out the water and mark setter by hand while occasionally using a bit of heat gun encouragement to finally get it snuggled in.

That’s the hardest part done!

With the side and roof graphics done, I went in and shot a mild coat of clear coat to seal those decals in before masking for the minor paintwork that this design still requires – really just more pinstriping. An iconic part of this livery are the white streaks coming off the headlights at the edges that run down the length of the sides. I could’ve done this with decals if I really wanted to, but I’ve found that I get straighter and crisper results with masking and paint out of stuff like this – long, thin decals tend to lay wavy or not completely straight, and it wouldn’t have been as vibrant as paint no matter what.

The stripe I masked at the roof was for the black line that bisects the Deora II on its original diecast toy – ironically, this isn’t completely accurate to the movie version of the car, which you can clearly tell has no black center line and instead is just blue underneath.

I’ve decided to do a bit of a blend of the movie model and the diecast toy, taking my favorite bits of each. To that end, the surfboard deck is being painted gloss black instead of mica blue, to emulate the look of the black edges and black center line that’s on the deck on the original diecast.

Thankfully I sized the deck decal right so it’s very basic and easy to apply here.

I also technically missized the surfboard decals – at a glance you’d think they fit perfectly, but looking at my original diecast, the edges of the yellow bits are supposed to end before the first surfboard fin, which means I’d have to push the entire decal further up and lose some of the red-to-orange gradient at the top. This bothered me a lot at first, but after seeing it together I hardly notice the difference myself.

Let’s talk wheels – the Deora II’s actual wheel sizes are like 24″ or 25″ or something insane like that – sizes that are pretty much nonexistent in the 1/18 model car aftermarket (especially for foreign tuner wheels), so going custom was always the only real option. After some searching, I thankfully found a 3D resin printer provider who was able to custom print me a set of these Rotiform DIA wheels, all based off a free-to-use 3D file we scored online.

These are pretty much the closest we’re going to get to the 5-dot wheels that the Deora II wore in the World Race movie. The actual holes for the “telephone dials” are a bit smaller than the Hot Wheels 5-dot versions, but you get the idea – the 3-piece hardware and stepped lip are nice little bonuses that make the JDM stanceboi in my heart sing.

The wheels as printed were a bit wide – I did have to cut about a quarter inch off the inner barrel to have them fit the 21″ tires I had from TK Diecast. These tires are the largest sizes that TK Diecast offers, and I still have to stretch them quite a bit to get them to fit over these wheels.

To fit them, I did have to chop up some of the original Deora suspension to make room for the more aggressive offset. It goes without saying that the front steering mechanism has to be sacrificed for this, but honestly the steering barely worked on the original model anyway, since the wheels were so big and the fitment was so tight.

Painted metallic silver, with the hubs on the rear wheels ground down even further to make the fitment work.

For the first time doing a 1:18 Deora custom, I actually had to disassemble the engine to get to the small little strip piece that makes up the bottom of the rear bumper, under the exhaust tips. The whole thing just pulls apart, held together by plastic tabs and a little glue. For the TEKU versions, I was able to just hand brush some gloss black between the exhausts for this piece, but for this WR livery, I’ll need to actually extract the piece itself and spray paint it to match the rest of the blue on the main body.

Some finishing touches as we move into final re-assembly – the taillight backings are painted in with Molotow Liquid Chrome, while I also added a bit of clear red to the inner taillight lens to make all four lights clear red, instead of the inner ones staying clear.

There it is! I’ve been hyping this up as the world’s first 1/18 Wave Rippers Deora II – hopefully that’s an accurate claim, as I’ve never seen anything like this done before.

Yes, she’s absolutely schlammed on the ground – that was (mostly) intentional.

I mentioned earlier that the original wheels for this model were dummy big, and that I had used tires meant for 21″ wheels at the largest. The custom printed Rotiforms are actually probably 22″-23″ inch wheels in real life scale, but even at that sizing they could just barely touch the ground if I fit them flush, hence why the ground effects like the skirts are kissing pavement. But take one look through my build history and you’ll see immediately that I’m a dirty slam-everything-on-its-nuts stanceboi at heart, so I absolutely adore this result.

The hatch prop is some random piece of wood I snapped to fit that I found on the ground because I forgot to bring a proper prop to this photoshoot lmao oopsies (it totally fits the beachside vibe tho?!)

I’m only noticing looking at this set that a lot of this livery’s key details and big color points are on the top of the car – the vibrant red/orange/yellow on the surfboards and on the Highway 35 logo are rendered nearly invisible when I try to shoot this thing like a real car (that is, at or near ground/eye level). I kind of regret not getting some more top-down shots showing more of the surfboards and roof.

Side by side with the original World Race series 1/64 diecast. This little Hot Wheels was such a key part of my childhood growing up.

I’ve become nearly an expert on this car with all the reference images I’ve poured over and research I’ve dived into in an effort to keep things accurate – you’ll notice that my version isn’t completely one-for-one accurate to the original 1/64 toy. The easiest difference to spot is the car number “1” marking appearing as orange instead of blue on the flanks – I had done this deliberately as a token taken from Deora II’s appearance in the World Race film.

I also pointed out earlier that I went out of my way to mask and paint the black stripe that runs down the top middle of the car, from the roof to the surfboard deck – this is a cue taken from the 1/64 diecast toy that featured the black line – in the film, there was no bisecting line and the areas between and underneath the livery were clearly just the same blue as the rest of the body.

I got so caught up agonizing over the small details about which version I wanted to build of the car – eventually I finally decided to let it go a bit and just create my own version with aspects pulled from different iterations of the car that I enjoyed the most. The model itself will never be 100% accurate to either the on-screen or original toy versions of the car anyway – for starters neither of those versions had a rear window surround at all!

I mentioned during my first build of the TEKU livery that the large rear quarter TEKU logo decal wasn’t flipped or mirrored for either side of the car, and that it was actually like that in animation, so I had technically just made my version more screen-accurate by forgetting to flip the logo.

Ironically, I only noticed during the decal design phase of this build that the Wave Rippers logo on the sides is actually very cleverly mirrored. It’s not quite the same as literally spelling the text backwards as though it were showing up in a mirror the way drifters and racecars do it in real life – Hot Wheels had just swapped the locations of the “wave” and the “surfer” graphics that sit on the actual text, so they’re always facing the same way on either flank while still having the Wave Rippers text legible from left to right. Clever and subtle!

Don’t talk to me or my son ever again >:T