Built by: Tory Mucaro

The Polar Excess

After years of pressure from animal rights activists, Old Saint Nick is forced to retire his 8 tiny reindeer and decides to replace them with four V-8 powered snow mobiles. Not wanting to anger the environmentalists, he develops a special form of methanol made from distilled reindeer feed corn. Each snow mobile is remotely controlled from the sleigh with conventional gas, brake and steering controls being converted to digital signals transmitted through a system of antennas. Having well over 1,600 hp at his disposal, Santa is now one jolly old elf!

This is one of those projects that started off as a “what do I do with this” sort of thing.  For years I had a busted up Outlaw kit that was partially built and painted sitting in a box of parts for years. I had hoped to one day restore it but when the Outlaw kit was re-issued several years ago I bought one which I will someday build as an Outlaw for my collection, leaving the busted up kit without a purpose. Flash forward several years and my model car club holds a “Christmas Theme” contest and I need to come up with something to enter. I start thinking about doing something along the lines of a hot rod Sleigh for Santa and what it might look like and “bam!” it comes to me. I could convert the Outlaw to a sleigh and have it pulled by some V-8 engined snowmobiles!

Unfortunately this would involve some scratch building to accomplish as there are no 1/25 scale sleigh kits to convert. Also the snowmobiles would need to be scratch built as well as the yoke. Since I’d been learning 3-D modeling for work, I decided to attempt to digitally model these components and have them output on a 3-D printer. Easier said than done but after a while I managed to create what I thought looked pretty cool. One of the drawbacks to the type of 3-D printing I used for the parts is they need a whole lot of cleanup to look presentable. And this was going to be multiplied by 8 for all the snowmobiles! So in the interest of saving time (and what little is left of my sanity) I decided that Santa’s sleigh would be pulled by only 4 snowmobiles!

Once cleaned up and primed, everything was given a base coat of gold, followed by many (I lost count after ten) coats of House of Kolor Candy Apple Red. Over this was sprayed my usual two part clear urethane topcoat giving everything a supper high gloss. Then all the areas to remain red were masked off and Alclad II chrome was airbrushed directly over the red. Finally the black drive tracks were hand brushed flat black.

Most of the sleigh above the chassis is stock Outlaw, with the exception of mating the grill to the body. The steering wheel is a custom part from my spares box, not sure what kit it actually came from but it looked pretty cool so I went with it. I painted the interior with a nice eggnog color and a deep red to give it that warm cozy look. The gauges are decals from a sheet out of the Revell “T” Bucket kit.

The Santa figure is an old cake topper supplied by my friend Andy that I completely refinished and to which I added shades from a Detail Master photo etch sheet. The snow on the base is good old Plaster of Paris.