Commission work is a bit of a finicky thing – I often enjoy the process of building cars to mirror their real-life 1:1 counterparts and challenging myself to see how accurate I can make a build, but by nature commission work also usually means I’m building something I normally wouldn’t be interested in building for myself or on my own. This S2000 is one of the first times I’m able to dip into a bit of both – it’s actually a car I’m intimately familiar with and see often (and have even borrowed/driven), and I now have the opportunity to take a crack at replicating it in scale form, completely bankrolled by a third party.
This AP2 belongs to my buddy Nathan I went to college with – I’ve seen this thing get built very nearly from the ground up – from its time as a bone stock Grand Prix White roadster, to a track day mishap that left it getting a little too intimate with a tire wall, to its revival as a bootleg Club Racer (sorry not sorry love you Nate).
I actually joked before about building his car in model form since a lot of the parts he has on it is actually available off-the-shelf in the model aftermarket (cough, because they’re basic bitch parts), but this opportunity was only really set in motion when his girlfriend Lina reached out about making it happen as an anniversary gift.
So funnily enough, this whole thing was built in secret without the actual car owner’s knowledge or input – Lina wanted it to be a surprise gift after all. I thankfully had full latitude for the build itself – I figured since it was supposed to be a big gift celebrating a momentous occasion, we should go big or go home right? 1/24 doesn’t quite have the stage presence or impact 1/18 does, and since money was no object…
Even this used AutoArt 1/18 S2000 model was well over $130. Those of you who are familiar with AutoArt’s quality, detail, and reputation won’t be surprised by this. I often only customize cheaper mass-produced diecast models when I do work with them instead of traditional plastic model kits (think Bburago and Maisto, the cheap stuff you can find at any Walmart and Costco), but I wanted to start with something more premium for this project, especially since it’s for a personal friend.
This model has clearly been sitting on display in someone’s crusty dusty house for a while – there’s a nice thin layer of dust over everything. The detail is exquisite as expected from AutoArt – the steering rack is even functional – the steering wheel turns the front wheels!
Lovely well-detailed engine bay. Thankfully I won’t have too much work to do under here, since Nate’s engine is bone stock.
Undercarriage is very well detailed of course, down to the oil filter and intricate rear subframe.
A few screws out the bottom and the chassis comes right off the body. Interestingly, the drivetrain itself is actually mostly attached to the chassis, and the engine bay piece itself is connected to the diecast body shell, that pulls some parts like the spark plug cover off the top of the motor when separating.
Seats, dash, windshield, and interior trim bits all pulled out, until we’re left with the bare metal body shell and plastic interior tub. The tub is actually very nice – the red carpet is all actual soft-touch flocking-like material – same with the trunk, just in black. This flocking is much nicer and finer (probably more scale accurate) than the flocking I typically use on my interiors.
The parts separation on the interior and especially the doors is quite nice – I’m able to just pull out the red door inserts individually as their own pieces for easy repainting into the sand beige Nate’s interior is.
Once you pull off the doors, hood and trunk, the actual body itself of the S2000 is very skeletal, owing to the lack of roof. We’ll be losing the entire front fascia, including the headlights, since we’ll be replacing them with AP2 units (the model itself is an AP1, or pre-facelift S2000, with different headlights and taillights).
Bless TK Diecast, one of the premier aftermarket parts providers for 1/18 scale modeling, for actually releasing a ready-fit Spoon front bumper that’s actually designed specifically for the AutoArt S2000 model. Up until now I’ve never really had a chance to build and modify a 1/18 model with aftermarket resin parts in this way, so it’s exciting feeling like I’m finally making that transition from my usual 1/24 builds to this larger scale, that feels like a completely different ball game on its own.
Side markers pop right out – we’ll be painting these chrome since Nate has clear markers instead of the factory ambers on his car.
Drilling out the tow hook opening in the Spoon bumper to make room for an actual tow hook to be installed later
For the aftermarket Mugen-style hood on Nate’s car, I was worried I’d have a hard time making it work since TK Diecast unfortunately doesn’t offer an aftermarket piece for it – but some random seller on etsy did!
I was really shocked someone was actually selling a 3D printed Mugen-style hood, also meant specifically for the AutoArt S2000 model, with the correct hood hinges and everything – it’s truly a plug-and-play replacement part. I’m not plugged into the 1/18 modeling community much since 1/24 is really where I butter my bread, but I didn’t think customizing AutoArt S2000 models was big enough to warrant these aftermarket parts??
Fitment isn’t as perfect as the original hood, but it’s serviceable. Some slight gaps on the edges – but that’s to be expected with aftermarket parts, even in the real world on real cars, right?
Nate’s running a set of Volk Racing CE28s on his car, in 17″ sizing (square, I assume). Luckily, TK Diecast had exactly that wheel in those sizes available!
Mocked up with most of the aftermarket parts we have so far. Despite my shock at so many of these parts being readily available as off-the-shelf resin parts, there’s still plenty of scratch-building ahead.
So fun fact – Nate’s car is actually wrapped blue – I don’t remember the exact name of the Avery color, but it’s basically the same blue found on the infamous S2000 Club Racers – which is why we bust his balls regularly about being a rep CR. It’s a Grand Prix White car underneath.
Conveniently, the AutoArt car I started with as a base was Grand Prix White – this means I can actually save myself a decent amount of work having to repaint the black door sills and trunk edging if I just mask them off and go for maximum accuracy – all the jams and frame bits are masked off to preserve the original AutoArt white.
Painted Tamiya Brilliant Blue!
Some cleanup will be needed for some bits of blue overspray, but the idea is there – it’s wrapped! With paint!
Didn’t bother keeping the insides of the bumper a different color or anything, since you’d never see the back of it anyways – just painted Brilliant Blue
To accomodate Nate’s aftermarket EVS mirrors, the stock mirrors have to be removed – and it just so happens that they’re cast as one piece with the rest of the metal doors, which means there’s no easy way to just pop them off. Enter my trusty dremel – an angle grinder for ants!
Once the original mirrors are shaved off and the area smoothed out and built back up with a little body filler, I’ve masked the inside jams to keep them white just like the main body.
This one’s just for the memes – Nate’s trunk is actually off another yellow S2000, since he’s prissy about drilling wing holes into his original Grand Prix White trunk or whatever. The yellow trunk itself is wrapped gloss black on the outside, so it’s a bit of a hilarious view whenever he opens his trunk and it’s yellow inside, black on the outside, attached to a blue car with white jams. Of course I’m going to go out of my way to make sure this is replicated in scale form.
Trunk exterior painted gloss black, with masking starting to come off the doors after the blue went on.
Interior work time! Nate has some fixed bucket Recaros in his car – I can’t be bothered to figure out exactly which seat model it is, but TK Diecast sure enough had a set of seats similar enough that I could use to approximate about the same look.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this on any resin aftermarket parts – the front of these Recaros are actually textured – they feel rough and fuzzy-like, the way real alcantara would at this scale. But it’s only on the actual front of the seat where it would be made of alcantara – the seat backing is still smooth. It’s a dual-textured piece! I don’t even know how the manufacturing and development process would work to create a print like this, but it’s very impressive – this texturing essentially means I’ll be able to have a nice fine textured seat without the need for any flocking.
Painted black and adding the headrest decals – everything here is provided from TK Diecast. See how the seat looks textured? That’s just straight after some black paint, no fancy flocking or carpeting work here.
Everything that was originally red on the model was sprayed over with some sand beige. Ironic in that I recall Nate saying he hated the beige interior.
To recreate the carpeting, I’m using my usual method with some Ken’s Kustom Fuzz-Fur flocking – sprinkled over a thick coat of Tamiya Flat Clear as the bonding glue.
Put it all back together and there it is! Luckily no modifications needed to the dash or center console – I kept those all as they were from AutoArt originally. Nate’s even running a stock steering wheel (surprisingly), so that went right back in the way it came out too.
Stock exhaust cut and removed right after the header. Impressively, the whole exhaust does actually run from the headers out to the tips. I’ve driven behind Nate and sniffed enough of his fumes to know he’s catless, so all of this is being replaced with straight pipe styrene tubing.
Some more aftermarket resin parts – this Voltex Type 7 was actually custom printed by a 3D print provider I’ve started working with for truly bespoke parts. As long as a 3D model exists of the part I’m looking for, I can send it to my printer guy to have it done. In this case, only a 3D model of the swan neck version of the Type 7 was available, even though Nate’s running a traditional bottom-center mount.
In that same vein, I also managed to find a 3D model of a Mugen hardtop that I was also able to get printed bespoke.
Despite sizing the width of the hardtop correctly, it’s actually a bit too short to fit properly length-wise. The hardtop edges are supposed to mount completely over the rear weather-stripping, but if you place it like that, the front and side window edges will be too short. This means I’ll have to “stretch” the 3D model in software and re-print it.
Mocked up with the bumpers, wing, and hardtop.
We can still use the swan neck wing stands – the top mounts just have to be cut off and modified into traditional bottom-mount stands.
Nate’s wing and hood are both bare unpainted carbon, which means we’ll have to use water slide carbon fiber decals to achieve that look. The parts are painted gloss black first for a smooth gloss finish that the decals will be able to lay over.
All the pieces I’ll need of the decals are traced from the original parts first onto the back of the decal paper. This 1/18 carbon fiber decal pattern sheet is actually also from TK Diecast – first time I’ve used their carbon decal patterns instead of the usual Scale Motorsports carbon pattern sheets I use for my 1/24 builds.
The wing will be relatively easy to decal since it’s mostly just flat surfaces for each piece, but the one-piece hood decal was going to be significantly more tricky. Not anything I haven’t done before (I actually did a carbon hood exactly like this in 1/24 scale for an S2000 too), but it’s never necessarily an easy venture.
This surprisingly…wasn’t that bad?! I’ve learned by now that patience is the name of the game with complex decal shapes like this, so it took over an hour slowly massaging out the creases around the vents and stretching the decal ever so slightly with some gentle encouragement from a heat gun to get it to lay smooth and conform around the vents – but it worked! I’m quite impressed with TK Diecast’s decals – they’re much thicker than Scale Motorsport’s carbon sheets, therefore resist tearing and ripping much better when I’m stretching it and massaging it around complex dips and creases.
Probably the part of this build I dreaded the most from the very beginning – Nate’s running a C-West rear bumper on his car, and this is the one part of his build that’s so obscure and anti-mainstream that there’s not even a 3D model available of this bumper I can resin print. This means if I’m going to make this bumper happen, I’ll have to build it from scratch. We’re starting by chopping up the OEM rear bumper to use as a base.
Starting out by building out the major pieces, like the integrated diffuser panels – those are just thin sheets of pla-plate bent and glued to the cut edges of the stock bumper. The flared bumper edges that are distinctive to the C-West design were created by stacking 4 1mm pla-plate pieces together.
Threw a little Bondo on there to smooth out the transition area while I fill in the rest of the bottom of the bumper and clamp it overnight to let the glue cure.
Filling in the little openings at the edges of the diffuser portion. All of this was built out using pla-plate and Bondo as a medium filler.
Refined with the Bondo sanded down and baby diffuser fins added. I’d normally charge up the barrel for scratch-built work like this. You’re lucky I like you, Nate.
Painted Brilliant Blue. Close enough, right?
Unfortunately, the one part of this build I just won’t be able to make accurate are the taillights – I couldn’t find any AP2 taillights available as parts or 3D files, and building such a complex shape like taillight housings is just out of the question for my skill level.
AP2 lights are distinctly different from these AP1 S2000 lights in that they have three bulb housings instead of the two here. I unfortunately can’t just add an extra clear circle on the inner edges to make it a three-bulb housing – the existing two lights in each side need to be shrunk and moved over to create the room for the new reverse light.
In an effort to at least approximate the look at a glance, I did go ahead and paint the inner clear lights with a red ring and amber center, to make them look a tad closer to AP2 lights instead of overtly AP1 lights.
Wheels painted light gunmetal.
The original wheels on the AutoArt model were actually pretty sophisticated in how they’re set up – the calipers are floating and mounted to the actual suspension subframe, instead of just glued to the rotors as one piece. This means the rotors turn with the wheels, as they would on a real car, while allowing the calipers to stay fixed. This isn’t a common feature on most low-end diecast models – you’ll often see rotors and calipers molded together as just one flat piece, glued to the subframe with the wheel attached on its own spinning axle or bearing.
I really wanted to keep this functionality with the CE28s – I even got a set of TK Diecast’s proprietary wheel hub system that allows you to use their aftermarket wheels while keeping them functional and spinning.
Unfortunately, the spinning hubs do add a bit too much offset to the wheels, meaning they’ll stick out way too far from the fenders. The fix for this normally would be to shave down the axle until you could mount the hub far enough inside the suspension, but I had already shaved off as much as I could without compromising the steering rack on the front axle – I essentially had to choose if I wanted to keep rolling wheels or steering wheels. Given that it’s (hopefully) unlikely Nate will be launching this thing off any hills or ramps after I deliver it to him, I opted to save the steering functionality instead and just glue the wheels directly to the axles in a fixed position without the spinning hubs.
This also means I’m essentially downgrading the brakes from the fancy floating caliper setup I discussed earlier to the usual cheapo single-piece disk and caliper setup you’d find on most models. The rear brakes are as they came off the original model, but because I bought this model used, the front right wheel was glued in place and missing a caliper.
This means I had to source a pair of replacement calipers and rotors for the front brakes – luckily I had an old 1/18 R34 GT-R laying around that I was able to cannibalize its rotors for. They’re even nice photo-etched parts! Ironically I had to go out of my way to find plain rotors instead of any fancy slotted or drilled units that are much easier to come by on the model aftermarket – since Nate’s running completely stock brakes.
Filling in some bumper details by hand. I only realized later that the lower intake hole I painted over in black here is actually supposed to stay blue lmao oops
TK Diecast includes a full AP2 headlight assembly with their Spoon bumper! From clear resin projectors and headlight lenses and everything!
Painted in by hand with Tamiya lacquers and acrylics – using clear orange and painting the back of the lenses silver to achieve the clear light piping effect.
The side skirts Nate’s running are very subtle and simple – I think if you didn’t know S2000’s particularly well they really almost disappear into the stock body look.
Thankfully this means they’re relatively easy to build from scratch – they’re really just two plastic flat bars glued together in an L bend.
Funnily enough, the carbon pattern on Nate’s real hardtop is actually just carbon fiber vinyl wrap, so in this sense me using carbon fiber decal overlay is actually even more accurate to the real thing
Once I trace the pattern out from the hardtop onto the masking tape, I transfer the tape to the actual decal backing, where I can cut the exact shape out I need. This makes laying decals much easier and generally less wasteful of material.
Custom printed LGC Racing water slides from TK Diecast because I know Nate’s brand is his baby.
The real car is running EVS (Evasive Motorsports brand) aero mirrors – even 3D models don’t exist of that design, so I’m left once again to build them from scratch. My starting point is a set of GT Type 1 mirrors from TK Diecast.
With the housings cut from their original stems, I wrapped them in carbon fiber water slides and built the EVS mirror stands from 1mm thick pla-plate. A little heat gun encouragement was needed to get the plastic to bend at such an aggressive angle and hold its shape.
Photoetched tow hook set from TK Diecast! I only needed the one single hook to create Nate’s tow hook he has in the front, but it’s very neat that the photoetch set comes with so many options, even seat belt buckles and tsurikawa!
I somehow dug up a spare 1/18 scale fart can exhaust I had laying around in my parts bin (I’m pretty sure this was from TK Diecast way back in the day too, from what I can tell they no longer carry these exhaust parts). The actual straight pipe from the header back is just a polystyrene tube.
I’m not sure what the brand of Nate’s exhaust is, but it has a little resonator can attached to it from what I can tell in photos – I created this out of thinner polystyrene tubing and just glued it to the existing fart can.
Nate’s Racebred front splitter I think is bespoke to his car (it certainly seems like it was designed specifically for his Spoon bumper and isn’t just a universal splitter), so I’m having to create it from scratch with 1mm pla-plate. Thankfully this was probably the easiest piece to scratch build since it’s just a flat splitter plate, nothing fancy.
It’s not even carbon!
Rummaged around my local hobby shop’s spare parts bin to find some random photo-etched parts I could cannibalize for the hood pins.
Nearly went cross eyed placing these. These little circles I think were originally meant to be gauge pieces for an interior? I’m using them to create the little push-pin hood pins Nate’s running on his carbon hood.
Normally I wouldn’t bother adding racing numbers to a street car build, but after asking Nate about it once, he mentioned that the vinyl numbers he has on his doors are pretty much on there permanently – his S2000 is his track toy car anyway, so it’s really a part of its identity. Luckily plain number water slides are abundant and easy to source online.
And finally, some finishing touches – it’s not really his car if it’s not running his plate, right? Even if Nate’s not running any fancy custom plate or anything. I recreated his plate along with his plate frame in photoshop and printed it at home on some good ‘ol cardstock.
Did it work? Did we get close?
The interior didn’t take nearly as much work as the exterior, but I do really enjoy how well the tan sand look goes with the blue.
As I mentioned earlier, this is really my first time doing this level of custom work on a 1/18 model, let alone an AutoArt, which is generally considered pretty high-tier as far as automotive models go. Having features like opening panels is still so novel to me, since 1/24 models usually only have opening hoods at most.
The fitment of the driver side headlight is…not great. Fitting the bumper and headlight assembly was actually a lot more difficult than I originally expected – there’s not a lot of surface area to glue the bumper on (only the fender tabs and the tabs between the headlights and hood), and the headlights themselves required quite a bit of trimming to squeeze in.
TK Diecast did include small tabs at the bottom of the headlights that I assume were meant to mount against the inside of the front bumper, but I ended up having to shave them completely off since they actually created gaps between the bumper and headlight assemblies. The bumper itself didn’t come with any mounting tabs for assembly, which is why it was tough gluing it on with only the small contact points available to me. My consolation prize is that the right side passenger headlight at least fits quite well with no extreme gaps.
Yes, the yellow trunk is lore accurate. I’m mad I assumed the trunk arms were black though, I should’ve left them white >:T
I’m very proud of how the rear bumper turned out – that was by far the part of the build I was dreading the most, since I didn’t feel comfortable or confident that I could get the shape right building that bumper using just pla-plate and Bondo.
I set out to just get close to the general shape – I told myself I could live with it if it just ended up being a close-enough approximation of his C-West bumper, and at the end of it even I can tell it’s not completely accurate – those side pieces should really dig further into the center of the bumper, but I think it’s very much close enough that any layman wouldn’t be able to discern the difference.
Delivered in its very own LGC Racing branded packaging.
Not the model wheels being shinier than his actual wheels. I should’ve dusted them in a coat of brake dust for maximum accuracy.
3 Comments
Mitch Lazarus
outfreakingstanding!! amazing build great write up and clearly lots of love went into this from all parties.
Barry Katz
Would like to have 1:18 of my s2000
Mike Bryant
Phenomenal attention to detail and craftsmanship. What an amazing gift. I’m not sure your friend will ever receive anything that tops this!