Jairus's Jurassic Park Explorer

04/01/2023

(Dumb April Fool's joke incoming)

Decided to go a different direction with the Explorer and make the real movie car of my dreams: a custom Ectomobile.

Just waiting on Facebook to approve the new page name and on my way to pick up a few rolls of hazard stripe tape!

03/30/2023

03/22/2023

According to Jurassic World, Mac Tools was the canonical brand of choice for Jurassic Park mechanics. Spared no expense indeed.

I'm still gonna stick to Harbor Freight until I have John Hammond money, though.

03/05/2023

It's not a good idea to paint in the middle of pollen season, but that doesn't mean I can't start thinking about colors.

Pretty happy with this test panel (though I may look into a slightly different shade of red), and I can get all these colors in stock rattle cans for easy touch-ups and repairs.

03/05/2023

This is why I get so excited about new old stock. These emblems have the same two part numbers but were produced in different decades.

The lighter blue ovals on the left are NOS from the 90s, while the ones on the right are from after Ford switched to a darker, almost navy blue for their emblems sometime in the 2000s.

A minor detail, but one that makes me happy.

03/05/2023

Best action figure ever. Competition's over. Close the entries. I'd like to thank everybody who lost.

02/23/2023

Story time, or: Far too many words about a tiny, insignificant trim piece.

I broke a few plastic trim retainer clips while removing interior panels and needed to find replacements. This was no problem for most of the clips, as they were used on multiple models and are still made today (albeit in gray and black, so Mocha vinyl dye will come to the rescue once again).

The thing is, where the plastic trim meets the headliner, the Explorer used 1.5"/38mm long clips with .75"/19mm heads from the factory (which seem to have only ever been used on the 1st-gen Explorer, so are naturally no longer sold). I was able to find a similar Ford clip with the same shaft length/diameter with a 25.4mm/1" head all over the place, so figured I'd just have to buy some and build a jig to trim them down to match.

Turns out, after re-checking a screencap (movie on the left, my Explorer on the right), the builders of the screen-used cars must have run into the EXACT same problem, because they appear to have used clips with 1" heads in those spots. I scaled it against a 56mm width for the strip they're on, and they measure 25.4mm on the nose.

It's neat to run into the same issue the original builders must have had (broken clips, no replacement parts) and have to solve it in the same way.

P.S.: I'm not dead, but the A4LD transmission started doing what A4LD transmissions eventually do (read: not shifting), so a lot of the work has been back-burnered until that gets sorted out (read: I dump more cash into the hole). Hopefully sooner rather than later.

05/06/2022

One of the "new" roof lights came with a slight injury. Luckily the housings are ABS, so all it took was removing the broken tab and printing a replacement also out of ABS. Solvent weld it in place, and it's as good as new!

05/05/2022

Back from the dead with a NOS screen-accurate light score!

As generous as that 23-year warranty from KC is, it still ran out 7 years ago!