The Kyosho Optima Mid is not hard to find on eBay, what is tough, is finding one that is complete, in good shape and for a decent price. After looking at dozens of auctions for months, I found this one.
When this one came, as always I tore into the box like a kid and pulled it out. The buggy was in relatively good shape, mechanically sound just a few bent bits and some cosmetic damage. The best part about this purchase is the amount of extras that came with it. It came with the manual, box (which is very important for the box art I need for the site),stock bumper, clear wing and best of all, a set of almost new Bridgstone Sand Super tires, it will look so good once they're installed.
This buggy does have something that will be very difficult to restore. The body is very rough. I'm not sure if my usual lexan restoration process will be enough to save this one. I will give it my best shot! Here are a few images of what it looked like out of the box.
This buggy had a few things that were in great need of being corrected. The chassis was bent quite badly and that affected the the entire drive train, even the belt guards were bent. Once all the bits and pieces were clean and brought back to their original specs this buggy went together with very little effort, even with the high number of parts. The previous owner did an excellent job of keeping all of the original parts in place. This made the restoration go very quickly.
The only thing that went horribly wrong was the body (as you can see by the above pictures). The previous owner painted both sides of the body with some sort of paint that melted the Lexan a bit. It is obvious around the windows. This body was also missing the rear mount point so I used a CD blank that you can find on the bottom of a stack when you buy them. It's a clear CD that works great for patching bodies. Using a Dremmel tool makes this quite easy. I will have to paint this body from the outside but it's much better than tossing it out. After all its hard to buy a new body, paint it and then beat the crap out of it on a runner.
