1960's Dodge Deora II Showcar Completed In Blender 3D

The past weeks have been very busy for me here at the workshop and away from home so I thought it about time to get another posting out to let you know what I have been up to.  I have welcomed into my little part of the world the new arrival of my first grandchild, did some traveling in my Mini Cooper to Tennessee to visit family, and finally gotten rid of an eye sore of a rickety old storage shed in my back yard. (48 or 50 coats of paint were all that was holding it up rickety.) Along with all  this I have found the time to do another interesting vehicle using Blender 3D. 

  Today was a very good day to put the finishing touches on this little project as the temps here in the Midwest have climbed into the 90's so it was worthless to try and do anything outside today or in my garage due to the heat.  Case in point.... the attempt at completing the Captain America ball chair that I have been working on for months on end.  Hopefully when it cools down a bit I can get back to that project and finally post it's completion to let you know how it all turned out. 

  So with out further delay here is my latest creation that I put my blessing on this evening. 

(Click on picture for a larger view)

This vehicle is the Dodge Deora II created in 1960's.  It has been one of my favorite show cars (or should I say truck?) and so I thought I would attempt to make a Blender 3D model of it.  This was a bit more difficult to do as there are no blueprints available to layout what you see here.  I found a fairly good assortment of photos of the car online but nothing showing me a top view, straight on front or rear view.  This made the task of creating this model more of a challenge than some of the other vehicles that I have created and posted about here.

With all of the vehicles I create in Blender I end up with a pretty good looking computer image for my efforts along with a bit of a history lesson along the way due to with my research I do looking for reference photos to create  the work you see here.

  The Deora II was originally a 1965 Dodge A100 pickup truck that was customized by Mike and Larry Alexander from Detroit for the 1967 Detroit Autorama at the time.  After the vehicle had won many awards including the Ridler award in 1967 Hot Wheels picked up on the design and created a plastic model kit from it which is still available today.  The last information that I found about the car was that it had been sold at auction in 2009 in California for $324,500. 

Here are a couple photos I found of the showcar under construction.  A ton of work went into the vehicle as you can see here.

The vehicle had no side doors but rather an unusual pivoting front door and a windshield that actually came from a 1960 Ford Station wagon.

The interior of the vehicle was rather spacy for the day with it's strange looking dual handled steering wheel and gauges laid out along the left inner side of the cockpit and a couple more on the center counsel. 

This image of the car really shows how small it really is.  The driver would have to be pretty short in order to drive it. As you can see from the photo above the guy in the photo had to be pretty cramped to cruise in this show car.  So that is about all it is..... a show car and nothing more.  Interesting just the same.  Hope you enjoy my latest Blender car modeling effort along with a bit of history about the Dodge Deora II.  I'll keep plugging along with my Blender efforts along with all the other projects that as still waiting to be completed in the workshop.  Have a good one!