Canadian advertising industry executive Martin Aveyard has turned his model car hobby into a 21st century art form, regularly wowing his 60,000 Instagram followers with astounding levels of detail.
Aveyard’s latest miniscule example under his Stoke Models banner is a Volkswagen Beetle, heavily modified to look like it’s ready to roll in the annual off-road California Baja Peninsular race.
It started out as a 1/24 scale Tamiya model of Herbie The Love Bug from the Disney movie series. Then Aveyard turned to his computer and 3D printer and reimagined it as a Love Bug with attitude.
The frame it sits on, the flared mudguards, the wheels, tyres, front bars, suspension, headlights, roof rack and its light bar, were all 3D-printed. So too the custom dashboard and wood-look three-spoke steering wheel. 3D also put together the flat-four engine and its exhaust system under a protective cage.
Then, to make the finished product more lifelike, he had it photographed in a pretend off-road situation, with the lensman’s fingers adding scale to the image.
The Baja Beetle is one of many scale models Aveyard has completed at night at his home in British Columbia. It’s purely a hobby – none of the models are for sale. “My kids are a little older now, so I had a bit more spare time, and I wanted something a little bit quiet,” he told website Hagerty.com.
“I sit downstairs after everybody’s in bed for an hour … it’s like a meditative hobby as opposed to something that’s loud, like grinding and welding, which I can’t do in the house at night.”
His 1:24-scale builds are incredibly precise – and he doesn’t stop with the vehicles themselves. Take the service station pictured below, for example. Although Aveyard says it’s not quite finished, the attention to detail rivals the twin-turbocharged Lamborghini Countach model it frames.
While Aveyard starts with basic kits from recognised names in plastic-car modeling –Tamiya, Aoshima, Hasegawa, and Revell – he often takes inspiration from real-world tuners
His first-generation Skyline GT-R began with a stock model he combined with an R32 kit. From there, he 3D-printed the tyres to fit barrels deeper than those of the stock R32.
“Then, I went to Speed Hunters to see what that exact engine looks like, because Rocky Auto out of Japan does these RB26 swaps into Skylines,” he said. “After that, I 3D-printed the exhaust, the intake, the battery, and all that stuff in the engine bay.”
Aveyard was disappointed with the quality and accuracy of the wheel and tyre set that came with his Revell Jaguar E-Type kit. He wanted a period-correct, spoked set – so he designed and printed it himself.
“The 3D printing is crazy because I printed those spokes unsupported – as they’re being printed, they just float in air, and then finally they connect to the hub,” he said.
“When it’s done, you’ve got an actual hub with three-tenths of a millimeter diameter spokes out to the outside of the rim. I won’t overestimate or underestimate what the printer can do; when I print, if it doesn’t work, I’ll try something else, but I’m amazed at how often it works.”
Aveyard doesn’t stick with miniature builds, either. Ten years ago, before getting deep into modeling, he restored a 1972 Triumph Spitfire, doing everything himself except paint it. He hasn’t honoured it with a scale replica, but he’s got plans for the vintage British nameplate.
“If I had known 25 years ago what my Spitfire would still be worth today, I might have picked a different car,” he said. “I would like to convert it to electric because I’ve seen a lot of people converting (Aston Martin) DB4s and E-Types to electric and some shops are even charging a million dollars to do it, but I think there’s a way to do it for less.”