I’m currently building a project Baja 5SC for an upcoming issue of Radio Control Car Action. The base for this project is my well used HPI Baja 5SC. Since a replacement body wasn’t available I decided to use the
stock body and thanks to TGN Distributing I can give it a new look by adding a sticker kit. They offer sticker kits in a few different colors and for my truck I chose to use blue. Here’s how you go about dressing up your stock Baja body
and make it look different from the others out there.
I started by removing the original stickers from the body.
The best way to do this is to warm up the sticker that you are taking off with
a hair dryer. This softens the adhesive that holds the sticker on and makes it
easy to peal it off. I start by warming up the section where I’m going to start
then warm the area just behind it as I slowly peel away.
After you get the stickers off the body you’ll need to clean up the little bit of residue that you’ll always get when removing stickers. I use WD-40 to make that happen. Spray the section that has the residue and let
it sit for a little while to do its magic on the material. Then I wipe the area until the residue is gone. I gave my body a quick overspray and wiped the entire body down to clean up any oils or dirt that was on it before moving on.
You can’t apply stickers to a body that has WD-40 all over it. The stickers will come right off. I prep it by spraying it down with Windex to clean up the WD-40.
Now the body is ready for stickers. The stickers on the sticker kit are pretty thick and won’t conform to the body all that well when used on tight corners so I stuck them on to the flat surfaces on the sides and top off
the body. You may get them to fold over those tight corners but in time they tend to peel away and debris gets in between the body and sticker and it will never stick again. Here the sticker is near one of those corners. Instead of
folding it along that edge I simply cut it along the edge with my hobby knife.
Here’s my body with my sticker kit installed after a few more it will be ready for action. Now that it’s stickered up I need to repair some cracks in the top side that the body got after some out of control freestyle jumps I did in the summer at our Race for a Cure. I’ll show you how I did that next. This sticker kit from TGN did a great job of changing up the look of my truck and saves lots of money in the end. Those big bodies aren’t cheep.
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