Hot Wheels - Simple and Fun Customization Project

Today I wish to share a little bit about simple and fun way to customize your Hot Wheels and this is purely intended to those who are new with such thing, if you are a serious Hot Wheels collectors that have tried this and probably is an expert in doing such thing, this article will not be interesting at all for you.

So here we go....

The modern Hot Wheels car are much better than those from 20 years ago and thanks to many new technologies and invention, Hot Wheels managed to improved their product finishing accordingly and still make them available at a relatively low price accessible to the masses.

Even so, most of the miniature die-cast cars (roughly at the scale of 1/60 or there about) in the regular lines from Hot Wheels remain as basic as it can be. Though the casting quality is and the painting finishing and extra decals application have improved in recent years, most of them still remain with minimal detailing - things like brake light or rear lamp or those signal lights and the head lamp or front lights were not detailed or colored accordingly. Nonetheless, this is expected considering the fact that Hot Wheels producing lots of this items and they try to minimize cost in the hope of maintaining a relatively low price, affordable for almost everybody and somehow still a decent income and profit for the company.

Take a look at this Aston Martin DBS for example:

Generally, as it is, the final product is enough to satisfy most of Hot Wheels collectors or the buyers or those kids who love playing with their Hot Wheels toys. However, for some adult or mature or serious collectors who love to get additional detailing to improve the finishing may not be pleased and thus usually they tend to "customized" their Hot Wheels accordingly - starting from the basic and all the way to the next level - there is no limit - it's all up to your imagination, efforts, capabilities and tools involved.

So for today, I'm just gonna share this simple and basic and yet fun customization tricks that I always did on my Hot Wheels... do take note that I am not an expert in this field and I consider myself as a mere beginners with very little skill and knowledge...

Usually we need an image or picture or photo as guidance and reference. We can use the picture available from the Hot Wheels packaging as reference or even better, using internet, we can search for the picture of the actual car.

For example:

Notes: I do not claim any rights to the above image. All rights and credits belong to the respective copyrights owner. Image is use for reference purpose only. Image is taken from: http://www.jjy1058.com/aston-martin-db-ar1-pictures/red-aston-martin-dbs-dce377be08e62361.html

OK, so I want to improvised the final finishing of this Aston Martin DBS and first thing first I want to color the front grill. To do this, I need a silver color marker pen as you can see from the picture below:

And this is what I did:

And then I applied a little bit of that silver color at the side of the door closed to the front wheels:

And lastly using the black marker pen, I did something else that is entirely based on my personal preference:

So basically such are the things you could possibly do without "dismantling" your Hot Wheels.

Now if you willing to go a step further, you need a drill...

While some other toy makers prefer to use small screw, most and probably all of modern Hot Wheels die cast car models at this scale use rivets, so to "open-up" your Hot Wheels, you need to drill that rivet down there...

Once that done, you can then separate the 4 main parts of the car, in this case, the metal body, the plastic chasis, the plastic interior part and the clear plastic "wind screen" part.

Now I want to add a bit of color for the interior part of this car.... just for the fun of it and I like it to have a little bit of red here and there, this one is purely based on your personal preference, some prefer to transform the color from that light silver (or is it grey) into black, then again, no right or wrong here, just do what you want and what you like at your own risk LOL...

So that what I did with the interior, again, this is my personal preference, you can do what ever you want, after all doing what you like is freedom and like what you do is happiness :-)

And this is the result once you put the car back together:

Again I want to say, this is merely basic stuff, you can do a lot more if you want to - some people will change the car's body color from red to pink or maybe green and they will add up fantastic decals here and there - there is no limit and it's all up to you..... most important is have fun and be happy with what you do....

Nowadays you can use Google to search for forums and websites and blogs or you can use YouTube to search for the videos, many hobbyist uploading the "how to do this and that" video related to this Hot Wheels customization, you just need to watch them and hopefully you can learn and do something far more superior than what you see in this article.

Good luck and all the best!!!

Apparently, just for the fun of it, I did some other stuff like these:

Using this picture and color as inspiration:

Original look:

And it become like this:

 

 

 

 

Original look (in fact the original color was white and I changed it to red and now I changed it again):

 

 

 

 

 

 

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