Fairylite Supercar Restoration by Special Correspondent Ferryman

When I was approached 18 months ago to restore this 1962 Fairylite Supercar I thought it was beyond my modeling skills. But when a friend very kindly offered to lend me a more complete toy as reference, I decided to take on the challenge.

[Complete Fairylite Supercar picture supplied by reader Paul M for comparison, Woodsy]

The damaged Supercar was missing nearly two thirds of the nose area on the top part of the bodywork along with a front wheel. There was also a large jagged hole in the rear deck. The canopy was missing along with the steering wheel and Mike Mercury. I decided I could take on the wheel and bodywork but not the canopy. With agreement from the owner I embarked on the project which eventually took six months to complete.

Step one was to build a new wheel. I did this from red plastic card that was a close match to the original toy colour. I cut two discs with a circle cutter, stuck them together and filed a rounded grove into the edge to hold the tyre. I mage the tyre from a length of rubber pipe that was super glued to the rim. The finished result was very close to the original wheel but not identical. I used the new wheel on the rear axel because it was less visible.

The next task was to repair the front end. I did this with the aid of some Fimo style modeling putty which I used to take a push mould from the front of my friend's Supercar. Once I had baked the push mould in the oven it was ready for use. I moulded the front end section in Milliput epoxy modeling clay. The moulded section was fairly crude but the shape was essentially correct although a little shrunken in size. The difficult part was fixing the replacement bodywork in the correct place on the broken plastic. Once this was in visually aligned I tacked it in place with some superglue. I then packed a lot more Milliput into the body to fill in all the gaps. Once this hardened I was able to put a fair bit of pressure onto new bodywork graft without it breaking free from the plastic of the toy. The replacement Milliput section was solid at this point, and had to be hollowed out so that the wheel could fit into the nose bulge. The hollowing out process was quite tricky because the Milliput needed to be cut away until it was only about 1 mm thick. The front end had to go through several stages of filling and sanding before it was ready for painting.

Whilst the front end was underway I also started filling in the hole in the rear deck. I started by covering the hole with plastic card inside the body shell and then filling the recess with Miliput. Once this was hardened and sanded smooth, I built up the panels another layer of Milliput.

All of the Milliput work was filed, sanded and primed repeatedly until the surface was totally smooth and blended in with the original plastic. Once the surface was free of imperfections the top half of the body shell was sprayed in white primer. The finished top half of the body shell was then cemented to the base and the whole thing primed in white primer. I made a photographic record of the vintage paintwork before I primed any of the plastic so that I could replicate the original finish at painting stage.

I had to repaint the entire body to ensure an even colour. This was done using a Halfords red car paint that matched closely to the original red plastic. Once the red paintwork was applied, I masked out the cockpit and sprayed it pale blue using enamel paint matched to flakes taken from original interior finish. The next challenge was to spray all of the yellow details onto the body using specially cut loose masks designed to replicate the original finish. I took a rubbing of the Supercar lettering on the baseplate, scanned it in and drew it up on my computer. The finished type was then laser cut into vinyl and used as a stencil mask to spray the yellow lettering onto the base.The finishing touch I added was the steering wheel. I managed to find an exact match to the original in the remains of a Telsalda Thames camping van! See what you think!

Pictures and text courtesy of Ferryman.

Complete Supercar picture courtesy of Paul M.