Built For Speed: Hot N Fresh

Built For Speed Build Journal: Hot N Fresh

By Josh Paufler

As most of you know, I love building weird stuff. So, when the Pinks Delivery Race popped up on my radar over at Flat Rabbit, I had to jump on it.

I delivered pizzas when I was a kid in my old beat up station wagon. To this day, it was one of my favorite jobs and my all-time favorite car. I wanted to replicate that while adding a twist of apocalyptic flare to fit in barside at Pinks Pizza in New Westrock.

I decided to build a mobile brick oven pizza delivery vehicle. I started with my roots in pizza industry, a station wagon, generously donated by Paul Gruell of Mayfield 41. From there, it was just a matter of building the oven. I was originally going to use HO scale bricks from a train diorama set but the thought of gluing each brick into place made me dizzy. I looked up pictures and videos on how to build a real brick oven and stubbled upon an adobe oven, made from clay. I figured that would be my best bet.

From there I went to my trusty Milliput, a two-part epoxy putty that air dries to hard-as-rock. The material is very easily molded and, with a wet finger, easily smoothed. Once I had the structure of the oven roughed out, I put it on the scale, only to find that it was overweight by about 10g. I wanted to add weight to the floor of the wagon to counterbalance the oven so I trimmed about 20g off the oven and re-sculpted it into the final form. What’s nice about Milliput is that it’s stiff enough to mold but you also have lots of working time. After I had the form I wanted and it was at the correct weight, I carved the mortar lines into the brick using the pointed end of a tweezers. After letting it dry for about a day, I went in with some acrylic paints and detailed the oven. Spraying it all with a matte finish gave the bricks a nice sealed look like what I’d seen in my research pictures.

Recently, I found a great little product for making oily looking parts on cars. It’s an acrylic chalkboard paint. I found it at the dollar store with the intention of building a car you could write on and erase. After trying it out on the wagon, I loved the results. I simply globbed it onto the panels and wiped it off, repeating until I got the desired look. It’s not glossy so it really looks like an oily, greasy mess on the car.

As that was drying, I applied the same technique to the interior to give it a well-worn look. I added weight to the floor after carving out a pocket under the seats, did my usual wheel work and the base was race-ready.

The only thing missing was the Pinks Pizza branding. Brian at Flat Rabbit provided drivers with the Pinks logos to adorn the vehicles. I used his logo and made it a little brighter so I could apply the chalkboard wash to it. I printed them out on sticker paper, applied them to the doors and gave them a hit of chalkboard paint to oil them up. Next, I used a matte pink acrylic paint pen to scrawl “PINKS” across the hood in a graffiti style. I continued the detail work by adding spiderweb cracks to the windshield and sunroof using the tip of a utility knife. I’ll make a video someday showing the technique. The finishing touch was a little puff of pillow stuffing, spray painted black, to simulate smoke coming out of the oven and Hot-n-Fresh was born.

I was really happy with the way this build developed. You just have to let the car speak to you and see where it goes. These days, you can find Hot-n- Fresh parked outside of Pinks in New Westrock waiting for a race or the next pizza order.