War Ensemble

Oh man! The folks over at Kotaku have uncovered our secret bunker! They had a short post on the site over the weekend about our work on the Tour Bus. Sweet!

We've also attracted some loyal, hardcore fans to our Facebook group "Tour of Destruction". There we'll have more regular photo dumps, videos, and updates going on, so if you can't bear to wait for our blog posts and you are a member of the book of faces, that will keep you sated. Temporarily.


But now, back to the important stuff.

While we were letting the primer dry on the mold for the body, we headed to a nearby park to put the Bus through its paces.

How fast does it go? Here's Sean showin' us how it's done.

The CNC mill we used to carve out the body is also great for some smaller more defined shapes (which we'll see more of later), but there's a lot of sanding involved. The Tour of Destruction just wouldn't be complete without its signature pipes, which need to be smooooooooth.

Like the body, the exhaust pipes need numerous coats of primer over the foam before we can lay down the fiberglass. The polyester resin that we are going to use for the fiberglass body will erode the polystyrene foam, so we need a thick protective layer. Remember, when you are dealing with the pink, always protect your junk.. or you junk might melt off.

We then put on our science suits and get ready to work with some noxious, nasty ass chemicals n'shit. Fiber glass is not for the feint of heart, and it requires a good amount of manly toughness to get it right. Of which we have plenty.

First we cut out sheets of it to lay over the surface of the bus. The fiber glass is literally sheets of long threads or fibers of glass - it's itchy shit.

But we look like mad scientists when using it, so who cares? Here we're mixing the resin and its catalyst together.

We've got about 15 minutes before the resin hardens to the point that we can't work it into the fibers anymore, so we lay the glass on quickly.

Dab, dab, dad-dabbity dab, scrub, scrub dab. We need to work the fabric a lot to mash out the bubbles and seams that occur.

For our last fiber glass layer, we dye the resin red. We thought maybe this will help as a base coat. We were wrong; it's all getting sanded off anyway.

Here we find Sean removing the body from the mold with the care and precision of a surgeon.

Lots and lots of sanding - we've got to get this guy smooth. Like butter.

The bus is finally starting to come together, but we can't relax yet! Now that we have the final shell for the body, we need to start adding some of the finer details to this rockin' bod.