This Tonka repainting project used a brown 1970's CJ-5 toy as the starting point. This photo was taken when I got the Jeep a couple of years ago. The front bumper was broken off, but except for the front fenders, the metallic paint was in pretty good shape. I was planning to just clean it up a bit. That is, until the spray paint accident that happened while I was working on the U.N. peacekeeping Jeep.
I had the brown Jeep on the workbench because I was measuring it for the homemade windshield on the U.N. project. When the can of white Tremclad burst, the Jeep got a lot of paint on the plastic interior as well as the body. I took the hint and decided to do another Tonka model based closely on a real Jeep.
The prototype I chose was a stock Jeep that caught my eye partly because of a classic 70's AMC promotional photo that showed the limited edition 1971 Renegade II in Baja Yellow, Riverside Orange, and Mint Green. At first I thought the photo was taken at the beach, but closer examination shows it to be a snowy parking lot.
The V6-powered Renegade also interested me because I recently found out it was the last model produced at the Canadian Kaiser Jeep factory, in 1969.
I thought this location for the model photo matched the look of the prototype photo quite well. It's actually my garage floor splattered with white paint. You can still see some white spray on the Jeep's tires too.
See also a front view of the Jeep, showing more of my redecoration of the garage (36K JPEG).
The roll bar was fabricated in the same way shown in my photos of Repainting a Tonka as a Fire Jeep. The spare tire is a Meccano part that matches the Tonka wheels fairly well.
The paint I used for the "Baja Yellow" was actually "School Bus Yellow". I did a simplified version of the graphics on the Renegade II by masking and painting with black. The wide black hood stripe on the prototype was advertised as "reducing glare".
I recently printed tiny copies of the Renegade II logo, and glued them in the correct location at the end of the hood stripes. See a photo (40K JPEG).
That's the last Tonka CJ-5 restoration candidate I have at the moment, but I have some ideas for a couple of flat-fender Tonka rebuilds. -- Derek Redmond
See also more Tonka Jeeps on The CJ3B Page.
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