About 3 years ago during the Early Bird weekend, Malcolm Scoto gave several of us Merit cars that he had built in his youth, he was hoping that we could convert them to slot cars. I chose a Lotus XI.

This car is on Ebay (22/03/08 to 29/03/08) being sold for the benefit of the

Acorns Children's Hospice Walsall

a charity supported by Wolverhampton Slot car club.

All proceeds from this sale will go to the Acorn's Hospice.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330221864593&indexURL=1#ebayphotohosting

The inspiration came from a brilliant web site called VIR history http://www.virhistory.com They have a large selection of pictures of cars which raced there in the 50s and 60s, they are my favorite type of cars: Club racers, driven by normal people having a go at motoracing.

In there I found this

I have always wanted to do a car in "bare" aluminium, this was it.

The conversion was really simple, I kept the car as built by Malcolm, hacksawed the bottom to take a Revell "ladder" chassis fitted with my best Revell RP66 motor ( the only one I had with brakes).

The wheels are from Strombecker, the chassis is mounted on hardwood body post.

The hard bit was obviously the finish, I used that marvelous invention called "Bare Metal" foil, fairly easy to apply, it can be stretched over curves etc..

I remember in the past collecting the inner wrappers from packets of Players Number 6. You could carefully separate the aluminium sheet from its backing paper and use that as bare metal finish. It used to take hours to do, and as a non-smoker, I had to rumage through dustbins to find it.

Because of the complex shape of the back, there are few creases left, but the overall effect looks quite good. The panel lines were made with a scribing tool following the existing raised lines of the Merit body. Although not really visible in the picture, the steering wheel is the one painted by Malcolm Scotto all those years ago. I could not find the correct red number in my decal box, so I nicked those from a Scarab sheet.

There it is, club racer Robert Weiler at Viginia International Raceway, sometimes in 1957. (With the correct number this time)