Fusing/Joining Bodykit Pieces!

[Kaze]

I couldn't think about what I should call this, anyways here it is! I'd also like to say that depending on which piece's you're trying to join this can get harder. My experience is that the work is moderate so I'd rate it a 5/10 on difficulty.

If any of you are like me, then you’ve taken sometime looking at the side skirts, air dams, and bumper combination for your Xmod. In the midst’s of selecting, at some point you thought to yourself “Man, why can’t I use this bumper, side skirt, air **** combination” (My example and test subject, the wide side skirts from the Lancer’s Wild kit with the air dam/ bumper from the mild kit). Well this tutorial is to help spark some ideas to create an infinite number of combinations not just with the car’s body kit pieces, but with other car’s body kits (example: RSX with Lancer wide skirts).

On with the experiment…

What You Need:

1 – Xmod Body w/Some Imagination
1 - Set of the Body Kit pieces you're going to use
1 – Modeling Putty or Super glue depending on how easy/difficult combining the two can be
1 – Side Cut Nippers
1 – Xacto Knife

Ok, so here we have all my materials gathered:



What I want to do is try to use the mild air dam (charge speed kit) and its front fenders with the Wild bumper and its wide rear fenders. From looking at the Lancer’s side skirts I’d figure there’s an easy place to make a cut and mold the two together with putty. I decided on this spot pictured below:



The cut, of course, is made in the same spot on the other pair of skirts.



Now, when you make the cut, make sure to leave a little extra in the direction where they’re going to be molded together. The reason is that you need to test fit them on the body to see how far you should sand/file it for them to make contact. After checking it, I sand/file down what little bit I have to in order to make them fit right on one another.



You can see that I left a litte excess below the line I wanted to cut (Above). After that I began sanding and test fitting the location of both skirts (below).





Ok, so the next step is to apply a little bit of putty around the spot where they join. It’s important to get the putty around the whole joint so that it has some strength and won’t break when impacted lightly. If you’re don’t have putty, and you can see that the two pieces match up almost perfectly, then you could apply super glue and hold them together. However I'd advise that if you don't plan on driving it much and just want the look.




Putty drying around the joint of the two parts.

Once the putty’s dried the rest is just sanding it down to take the shape you want. Remember to sand lightly otherwise you might shape it the wrong way, or sand into the joint causing the pieces to snap apart again (It happened to me :P).





Sanded down skirts (Above).

Once you’re done, add what ever detail’s you’d like (I sanded out the vents in the fender), go paint and admire your work:



These are the skirts primered....

Thanks and I hope this inspires some people.