Archive for January, 2003

Creating a Pig-Tail Antenna

by payaso

Pig-Tail AntennaThis is a great mod, especially for beginners. It’s extremely easy to do, there are no parts to replace, and it’s not only stylish, but functional.

First, take the body off your car to expose as much antenna as possible while keeping it intact.

With that, grab a Q-tip? or something similar, you’re looking for a round – tube object, not quite as big as a pencil and yet not as small as a toothpick.

From the bottom of the antenna (closest to the body), start tightly wrapping your antenna around the Q-tip until you reach the end of the antenna.

Hold there and tighten any loose wraps, make sure it’s snug and keep holding it tightly for a minute or two. Now let go and remove the Q-tip from your newly created “pig-tail” antenna, enjoy!

Painting Your Body: Part 2 – Laying Paint

by payaso

Base PaintAfter reading the first article and getting our masking and primer done, let’s remove the masking, and clean up any bleeding. After the primer paint dries we’ll mask for design, effects, and parts then lay down our base coat paint (the main color of your body).

Once your first coat of paint has dried, if desired – you can keep painting an overcoat to fix any imperfections. You should however, try to reduce the number of overcoats, after all, we’re dealing with micro sizes and weights, and thick – heavy paint jobs add weight, plus there’s a tendency for the paint to run more.

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Painting Your Body: Part 1 – Masking & Primer

by payaso

There’s no introduction needed really, it’s pretty self-explanitory ? we’re talking about painting a Bit body here. The only thing to note here is that we’re talking about painting right on top of the body. This allows you to paint fine details like side-view mirrors, headlights, grills, and have them blend in naturally with the paint on the rest of the body. With that said, let’s just dive right in shall we?

MaskingFirst, make sure you body is clean with no dust specs, hairs, etc. It must be clean, if there’s any debris, it’ll ruin your paint job. Cans of compressed air come in handy for blowing away debris, while keeping the body itself free of finger prints, scratches, fuzz, etc.

Now, it’s time to do some basic masking, unless you plan to have your windows painted, you better mask them. You can just use regular manilla colored masking tape, cheap, easy to find and easy to manipulate. Take pieces of tape off the role, relatively the size you’re going to need, you want to work with only what a piece the size neccessary to cover the area to be masked.

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More Grip, Less Slip On Your Old Bit Tires

by payaso

Worn TiresThere are several ways to approach this problem due to variables like initial tire compound and racing surface. So, I’ll try to keep this as general as possible while still actually proposing valuable solutions.

After racing with your bit for a while, you’ll notice your car doesnt quite turn like it used to, tires get rounded edges and the rubber feels smooth. Here are a few options to combat this problem.

Score the tires
You can use a sharp knife to slightly make little cuts in the tires in a diagonal direction, this should help the tires grip when spinning in the forward motion.

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