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M38

02/08/2016

Tamiya Corporation. (1982). Box art for Wild Willy M38
RC Jeep model [Illustration]. Used under fair use.
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This is a Tamiya M38 Wild Willy (short wheel base) which I have had since childhood. A long time ago it was pretty much trashed. So awhile back I took it upon my self to rebuild it. The whole front end was smashed, all the electronics needed to be replaced and the rear axle housing was cracked.

Tamiya no longer supplies parts for this model. I was able to source the electronic and drive train parts fairly easy but not so for the body parts. Autocad 2004 came to the rescue. I was able to completely reverse engineer every front end part.

Then came 3D printing to the rescue. I spit each part out as a STL file and uploaded the to Shapeways and boom….I had my front end. I also had some trouble figuring out the proprietary colors for paint but I overcame that with a little searching.

Some day I’m going to upgrade the power pack to lithium. I would also like to find Another one to restore some day.

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End of blog. Thank you for reading!