Scaled Down To Perfection

3 min read

I guess it’s safe to say that the vast majority of car folks started their fascination with the automobile when they obtained that first toy car back when they were young kids. Didn’t matter if it was just an inexpensive plastic car from the market, there is something in it that triggered that lifelong obsession with cars.

Whether you are tinkering with just one old project, or you own a big collection of cars, before you became a car junkie, I bet you were collecting toy cars. Hot Wheels or Tonkas or its kinetic Remote-Control counterparts such as the Tamiya are the common denominator of how it all started. I myself can attest to that, as I refuse to outgrow that childhood passion for the toy car. Today, the interest in both diecast collection and the RC had become so significant, it is not just considered a subculture within the car hobby, but a mainstream in itself.

But while most aficionados would buy their toys from Uncle Johnny’s or their favorite online hobby shops, very few people in the scale model/RC community would actually make one from ground up. Yes this car is not the real thing. But the specifics are so minute that unless you look closer to it, you would have thought this is an actual old Volkswagen Baja Bug with true patina that can only be designed over a long period of time by mother nature.

Wed and Rosa Lodriga are husband and wife team who both work as Art teachers. They graduated from the Philippine High School for the Arts in Mt. Makiling as Visual Art Majors and continued their studies in U.P. Diliman, Wed taking up Fine Arts while Rosa took Architecture. Rosa does miniatures and dioramas while Wed is a sculptor who builds monuments, statues and public art. Wed has been involved in both R/C racing and he owns a classic Volkswagen Beetle himself and so the intersection of all his interests led him to build this scaled down Volkswagen Baja Bug.

No, this is not the typical RC Body that you can buy and just “paint-it-yourself” kind of deal. This car was hand built from scratch during Wed’s spare time and correctly scaled to 1:5, so you could imagine all the intricate details and the measurements spent building this project and turning it into an exact miniature version of the Baja Bug. Wed initially sculpted a clay model and made a silicone rubber mold as negative and although the finished product looked like some rusted old metal sheet, in reality it’s a cast made up of fiberglass. It took talent and dedication as Wed has to paint fiberglass and create an old dulled-by-nature metallic finish, in fact just the weathering of the body and its chrome trims took a month to complete. The car sits on HPI Baja 1:5 chassis and is powered by a 32cc 2 stroke engine.

Thanks to Wed and Rosa for their passion in creating these automotive art that expands the boundaries of the car community. Check out the photos as it speaks for itself. For more details on their artwork, their info is below