This Enthusiast Is Making the Toy Cars Hot Wheels Won't, From Scratch

These days, Hot Wheels goes for some pretty deep cuts in terms of the vehicles it chooses to immortalize in diecast form. For example, if you told me when I was a kid that Mattel would do up the Nissan Silhouette Skyline I'd known from Gran Turismo 2 and I'd be able to buy it in Target across from the Batman action figures in about 20 years, I'd have thought you lost it. But even then, there are some cars, real or fictional, that will never get that treatment. That's why Leander Shaffer's efforts to create the toy cars that companies can't or won't is so damn cool.

By day, Shaffer's an engineer for a company that develops playground equipment. When he's got free time though, he's churning out small cars by the dozens—every make and model you can dream of, as proven on his Twitter page. The Honda CR-X Del Sol LM Edition from the first two Gran Turismo games. The Volkswagen Phaeton. The knockoff sixth-gen Civic Si from PlayStation 2-era classic Midnight Club II. Even the Tom's Angel T01, a nearly Autozam-sized concept from the mid-'90s that was supposed to tease a production sports car from the Toyota-affiliated racing team and tuning company.

What's more, they look good. If you handed me a 3D printer and showed me around modeling software Blender, this is the kind of stuff I'd want to make, but my attempt would probably resemble my clay projects in sixth-grade art class. I write for a living, so you can guess how those turned out.

The custom Hot Wheels are actually a "super recent thing" in Shaffer's words. For the better part of six years, he's been crafting custom car bodies for XMods, a defunct brand of remote-controlled cars that were sold through RadioShack in the 2000s. That eventually turned into 1/64-scale models as well as Choro-Q-inspired replicas, in the style of Tomica's line of cartoonishly-proportioned pullback cars.

"Normally I like to make [a car] into the XMod first because as you know, a Hot Wheels car doesn't exactly have one-by-one-by-one scale ratio on all quarters," Shaffer said. "They're generally from what I found mainly wider and a little taller than what their OEM [equivalent] would actually be. Cause if they were like, proper scale and length, they would be boats."