wagoneer

Your build is an example of why I love this forum, every day I learn something. Having never seen this aircraft before I'm now off looking it up and enjoying your pictures and great build. Wag

Jolly clean build this, the car looks factory fresh. In answer to your question about the brake fluid master cylinder, the Chrysler reference I have shows the large cylindrical bit to be a bronze colour with the fluid distribution block being black (along with the brake pipes). I expect though that a black finish would have been through paint over a cast aluminium or similar piece. I do love BMF, but like you do a bit at a time. Yours looks rather good though. Are you going to run a little dark wash between the quarter light frames and the main door frame? Wag

Martin, that's some gorgeous carving you do. It's a joy to see the results of such skills. Your P6 is amazing. Do you sell bodies taken from your bucks? Wag

Oh so crisp! Those tyres look cool, how did you do that?

I built that a few years back (15 probably) and enjoyed it very much. It almost fell together. Looking forward to seeing this. Wag

Hello Riggers! He did indeed drop me a line. The advertising is from me. Progress is slow on the transfer front as the real job has been a bit demanding of late, plus Mrs W has a list that wants fulfilling...

Wow! Nice model. I struggle to see anything that small these days so it's great to see pictures up close! Are these old kits?

Before I begin, I must thank Lindan who has appeared on this forum once or twice as he’d approached me to produce some custom transfers for his own build of the Revell bus. It was his build that inspired me to get myself the kit. I’ve not set out to be too faithful to any particular bus, but to build myself a model that I’ll enjoy building. Please excuse any technical inaccuracies, colour deviations or other ‘faults’. Let’s begin with the engine then. My preferred option was to go for the AEC Leyland engine rather than the Scania as I had better reference pictures that I’d taken whilst at the Cobham Bus Museum at Brooklands. The whole site there is well worth a visit as it houses a good story on the history of the bus with many fine examples to see, plus a superb collection of racing cars to compliment the history of Brooklands as a motor racing circuit. Outside, apart from some remains of the old concrete banked curve of the pre-war track, there’s also an interesting collection of aircraft that are accessible (yes, you can climb inside too) with in some cases, real human guides to take you through the history of the type. So, the engine. The basic block looks OK, and close enough to the one I had as reference, but it needed plumbing. This is simply some brass wire bent to shape and poked into appropriately drilled holes. I also sanded smooth the rocker covers and made new plastic card tops to match my reference. I also made the injectors (a little over scale) that the six fuel lines run into. They’re just some drilled scrap sprue that I heated and stretched until the diameter was about right. The black ‘boot’s on the wire is the insulation that came on the wiring. It’s all bent by eye, even though I considered a jig. There’s so much detail that could be added but I wanted to finish this someday as there’s plenty of other kits in the stash and only so much time! Here’s the block after a coat of Halfords acrylic primer and a bit of dirtying up with black oil wash. I used the kit supplied fuel rail (or whatever it is!) just removed the mounting tabs as it appears to be held in place by the short lengths of pipe from the injectors to the rail on the real thing. It’s the kit exhaust here too with a bit of weathering. There’s a tiny piece of foil at that joint that will hold a cable running past when the engine is installed. To lend scale, here’s the fuel cut off valve label that fits around the pipe. I put the kit transfer onto a piece of thin foil so I could bend it about a bit! The Engine's installed in the chassis now so I'll show this fitted just after we move on to the cab.

Sorry! I posted in the wrong place. See In Progress.

I've used a Swann Morton No 3 handle with 10As since 1986! Mostly back then though it was as a commercial artist. They felt comfortable and with the metal handle and blade fitting being so slim, there's not the cumbersome handful that you can get with other types. Blade removal is always done by hand, left hand index finger to push the blunt end up a little, then pull from the spine of the blade with the right hand. Easy. One modification I made was to round one old blade off on a grinder to give a nice curve. This does duty as a scoring edge when I'm working with paper models.

That was looking impressive until you put it beside the paint jar. Now it's gone beyond impressive to I don't know where! A great inspiration for the helicopter I've got in the stash too. Your scratch building at this size is truly remarkable.

What lovely paint schemes. I can imagine a world where the ex-fighter pilot buys his wartime mount off the RAF and paints it like this as a 'run about'. The colours and design look right for the period which helps enormously I think. Wag

Lovely weathering on a nicely built model. I keep seeing all this talent for weathering and am almost too scared to try myself.

My wife finds me more appealing when I don't play my guitar. Fortunately, both guitars and models are in the same 'man cave' space so I can indulge both together! Any build provides some kind of inspiration so carry on, please share your experience as there's always something new to learn.

Goodness what a kit! I think there's more parts in that than in my 1:1Nissan. For the chrome, might I suggest the chrome film that people who wrap full size cars use. 3M make one that is 3 Milli-inch thick or 76 microns or 0.076 of a millimetre.

That is superb! It's hard to believe this is your first scratch build too, everything looks right and it's such a clean build. I drive a Micra and believe me, even though I don't hang about, there's always someone trying to drive through me just because of what it is!

Hello. Very interesting, and for me, just fine here. What scale is it please? I'm thinking 1:72 from the scale of the cutting matt!

We only had a black and white telly when I remember my dad watching The Prisoner so the car was various shades of grey!

I've just bought a bottle of the Humbrol decal fix too. Never used it before either having previously used Micro Sol/Set. There's some good tutorials on Humbrol's Youtube channel including one on using this to apply deals. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=humbrol+decalfix&oq=humbrol&gs_l=youtube.1.7.0l10.1663.2663.0.4996.7.6.0.1.1.0.57.261.6.6.0...0.0...1ac.1.11.youtube.KMGp-fk1ByE PS - good avoidance skills with SWMBO! Mine doesn't understand that more kits make a happy man either......

Ooh good link. Thank you.

Superb! For anyone not familiar with the route this bus took, they (and everything around the area) did look like that! One of my grandads worked at the cement works at Northfleet in the 60's so he may well have got on this bus.

The suggestion of spraying a light coat of the masked colour is superb. I'll try that next time. It might be worth noting that it's a good idea to remove the masking before the paint dries. This gives the painted edge time to settle and dry rather than risk being pulled off by the tape. I always pull masking tape back on itself rather than at 90° to the surface too.

Goodness! That looks as complicated as building a real car with the added hindrance of being full of fiddly small parts! Very much looking forward to following your progress with this whenever you begin.

Something else I've thought about is doing it like this: A bit of white decal film to make the text show up then the red part with the text out of it fading to nothing on some clear decal film.

Ah, I see what you mean. I've got the same issues on my build with the internal lettering. It might be possible to print the body colour on the decal as well if you can match it to the paint. This is something I'm going to experiment with myself having been asked to produce white transfers to go over colour. Rather than trying to print heavier ink coverage, why not print a couple of copies of the text then over lay one on the other to increase the density.