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And now for something completely different…. It's very different for me, but I can also guarantee that this hasn't been done on this site before. Let me introduce you. It's a civilian (no, please don't go!), wheeled vehicle (at least close the door on the way out). I know you're a load of vicious brutes who usually get your kicks from things that go BANG! But if you hang around you might even learn something (if you already know I'm an idiot, you might as well turn to the other channel now). This is a class of vehicle that I wasn't previously aware of. Road Steamers were a development to the very early Traction Engines. Where as Traction Engines were intended as a portable engine – to do a job of work when the reached their destination, road steamers were pretty much, the first trucks. This one is loosely based on the first Robey Steamer which first trundled the roads in 1870. Disclaimer: This may not be the most historically accurate model in the history of the universe, I scoured t'internet and only found about a dozen or so pictures of the vehicle in question. And ALL of them are different. We aren't talking minor differences, they all show major variations, as a result this is going to have to be a bit of a hodgepodge. I believe this is the first model ever attempted of it – I wonder why? Oh yes, I will be using the past tense because I have completed the build – I didn't have time to do a WIP on here until now. Part of the reason for the differences is probably because this is long before mass production. Each of these vehicles was individually made, possibly for a specific job. The working life of them may have been measured in decades, so they could possibly have been altered at some point. Another problem is that I think that some of the differences are down to artistic licence as these two engravings show. They are obviously the same machine, but it shows differences: As an example, in the first engraving I've shown, you can clearly see something clinging to the back of the boiler. I can only find two other pictures of this and ALL three of the pictures are completely different, so I can't use those pics to work out what this one looked like. Every other picture I have doesn't show anything attached to the back of the boiler at all. Add to that, they all disagree on the shape of the body; the details on the boiler; the funnel; the wheel details, the steering wheel etc. etc. So if you see me do something and think "That doesn't look like the picture", you'll have to accept that I've seen that element in a different picture. Honest. Anyway, enough excuses, if you've manage to get this far - onto the actual build. As usual I'll tackled what I've decided would the most complicated bit first (before discovering that most of the rest of the model is even more complicated). I started with the gears, although to be honest, I wasn't sure how much of them would be visible on the completed model. Scaled to the correct size in Inkscape, print off, cut out and glue on to plastic card with white glue. Top tip! You need to go out to your woodwork workshop in the garden and in the fourth drawer down in the tool chest, at the back you'll see your Robert Sorby wood carving gouges. Choose the one that exactly matches the radius of the inner wheel rim….. What? What do you mean you haven't got a carpentry workshop in the garden? Well that's hardly my fault is it! Using the gouges and a varied multitude of tools I removed the bits that are non-gear and voila, I was left with a toothless gear. A gummy-gear? Trying to cut the gears by eye was a disaster (stupid idea, eyes are much too soft to cut plastic) the teeth looked like the work of a 14th century blind dentist. Even marking them with a pencil was futile as the file kept slipping on the convex surface. My JLC razor saw came to the rescue. I used a bit of 1mm thick styrene as a spacer between two blades. One of the blades was set higher than the other so that when one blade had sawn down to the correct depth, the other blade just scored where the next cut would be – then move the saw along one space. This gave a key for the file to get a decent grip. The diagram below should help the hard-of-thinking. Nearly three bloody hours it took to make this thing!