Model Cars made in Steyning To drive a winning racing car was a rare ambition and to own a highly detailed scale model of one was to have a rare prize in itself. Living in Steyning, Rex Hays was an engineer who had apprenticed in a bus and truck factory before working for MG cars at the famous Brooklands racing circuit. Rex Hays had from the age of eleven in 1921 been scratch-building his exquisite intricate models of racing cars and what we now call classic cars. He built them in different scales: 1:20, 1:12, and 1:10 and his models had opening doors, bonnets and boots with the finest of engine detail that seemed miraculous to replicate in miniature. With skills similar to those of a watchmaker, Rex Hays’ models were so prized that some were commissioned and presented as trophies drivers in major races. One model, the E.R.C. Club Trophy consisted of a replica of an E.R.A. car exhibited with its bonnet removed to show the four thousand metal parts in its engine construction. This model is now on display at the Steering Wheel Club in London. Car manufacturers, transport museums, Formula 1 constructors and royal families from across the world commissioned Rex Hays. For King Faisal, Rex built a model of a 1929 Mercedes. So notable was the work of Rex Hays that in 1952 the Duke Of Edinburgh was asked during the planning of the Model Engineer Exhibition what he would like to see there. He requested a work by Rex Hays. Rex arrived at the show bringing his model in two trucks. He had surpassed himself with this design, which was a four hundred foot long slot-racing Grand Prix track. The electric model cars raced between authentic-looking model crowd stands complete with advertising boards, in which the spaces had been sold in advance to real companies. The exhibit proved extremely popular with the Duke, the organisers, visitors and the sixty thousand pupils at the later held Schoolboys’ Exhibition. In 1955, it took Rex Hays seven weeks to perfect his model of a D-type Jaguar commissioned
as a present for the young Prince Charles who was accompanying the Queen to the Jaguar works at Coventry. He made it with the finest detail that included genuine green upholstery and authentic dashboard material used in the real car. Rex Hays would study a car and draw up his own blueprints for a model, as he knew the manufacturer’s blueprints never completely matched the finished version of an actual car. The bodywork for Rex Hays’ models was wood, a French Lime that was meticulously chiselled and scalpel-shaved to the millimetre. He insisted that, “The complicated and subtle contours of a modern sports-racing car can be reproduced better by carving than in any other way.” Rex Hays didn’t believe in metal bodywork, calling it “phoney realism,” if a modeller wasn’t prepared to use the exact mineral content as used in the original car. A model was brushed with two-coats of Shellac and when dry was sandpapered. The process was repeated until the wood was indistinguishable from metal. The model was then painted and then sprayed with a minimum of six coats of cellulose. Rex Hays photographed each intricately detailed miniature upon a modelled road surface with a replica house brick wall in the background. The photographs of the model car were compared to photographs of the real vehicle. He would only consider a model finished if people couldn’t tell which was the model and which was the actual car.
Have a local editorial item? email: Villagelivingmagazine@gmail.com November 2021
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