Tamiya Stadium Blitzer Project

Page 1: Assembly

The chassis of the Stadium Blitzer is identical to that of the Blitzer Beetle which I've already documented in detail. Please see that page for more information. I'll only discuss the relevant differences here.

The Stadium Blitzer comes in a sizeable box with some lovely classic box art. The contents inside are not as well presented as many other kits. The body and wheels are on one side of the divider while the plastic parts sprues are on the other.

Here are the parts laid out on my build table, and then we jump straight to the completed chassis. As far as I can tell, there are zero differences between this chassis and the Blitzer Beetle chassis apart from the body post locations. This is not a complex build and goes together pretty quickly. Note that this model came with an older ESC without an integrated voltage regulator so I added an external BEC which I was able to hide nicely under the unused mechanical speed controller plate.

This is a simple plain white paint job, right? Wrong. It was actually quite a bit of work. I started by masking the windows, then the areas to be painted white, then the areas to be painted black. Silver is limited to the roll cage so I left that open as shown on the right. This was quite a complex masking job.

On the left you can see the black under the windshield, the black grille, and some black under the roll cage. The right hand image show more detail of the silver roll cage and rear deck prior to painting the black.

Now I've removed all the masking and completed the paint. I did all the white with the window masks still on, then backed the whole thing in black. Finally, I removed the window masks and smoked the windows. I wanted them to be tinted since there is no driver or anything you want to see inside.

The addition of the stickers always totally changes the look of the vehicle, and this is no exception. For some reason I thought this was going to be a somewhat bland livery since there is no color, but it actually looks really good.

The completed model is now ready for its inaugural drive. Due to the width, this is a very stable model so hopefully I won't roll it over much and screw up the body.

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