If there is anyone that does not know the history of the Snake and Mongoose here is a brief history: Don “the Snake” Prudhomme vs. Tom “the Mongoose” McEwen. Their racing feud made headlines for years. But it wasn’t until toymaker Mattel entered the picture and made the Snake and Mongoose Funny Car rivalry a Hot Wheels promotion that drag racing became a multimillion-dollar business. They were one of the first teams to have promotional stickers all over the outside of their race vehicles.
Like always the plan begins with the drawing:
It always starts with a block of wood:
Then the top is added and the center is cut out, this helps reduce the weight of the final car to an acceptable amount, at this point the car weighted 9.57 oz. with the 2.42 oz. we cut out of the middle of the block.:
At this point the sides were trimmed down to 2 and 3/4", and the weight was reduced to 7.44 oz,:
Now I was ready to make this look like a car, I cut the horizontal profile from the block, then cut the vertical profile:
Then I was set to begin letting the “inner block” out, the rough carving stage:
From here I proceeded from the coarse sanding to the fine sanding of the profiles:
Then the priming, priming and sanding helps to eliminate the wood grain from showing through the final paint:
The priming step is usually done multiple times, with sanding in between to get the body real smooth:
And then the paint is applied. The paint on this car is Dupli-Color touch up paint, this is an acrylic lacquer and makes or a fine finish for the car:
Then all of the time I spent re-drawing all of the decals for the car really started to show through. After the decals were applied the body was cleared. Then an aluminum bottom was fashioned and the car was weighed:
When this car was complete it weighed in at about 4.4 oz. weight was added to bring it up to 5 oz.
This car was built for our car club Pinewood Derby, this year in the Real Street race “The Snake” took first place for speed in this race. It was also entered in the stock PWD race, in this race the car was awarded 4th place.
