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Studio Scale UFO SHADO Mobile from Kits for Cash [COMPLETED finally!!!]


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So I've decided its time to stop just looking at this huge box of resin and do something about it!

I first heard about this kit at Telford in 2014, talking to Ian from Kits for Cash when I bought the UFO kit which has been built since this thread started:

 

 

 Then last year (2015) they actually had it with them, it looked superb...

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This is a very limited run of kits, so much so that there were only 17 available for sale and the price was considerable (cough!) However Ian was such a good salesman that when he said I could pay in instalments, my resistance finally crumbled and the credit card timidly appeared!

So back in December a very large box arrived on my doorstep... on opening it there was an insane amount of resin!!

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Yes thats a 12" white ruler in the middle of it all! A few weeks later another package arrived and it contained the driver figure

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Pity its not Gabrielle Drake though... ;)

It must be said the casting of this resin is superb. The detail is crisp, I can't find any major pits or bubbles, and everything is solid and complete. There are lots of lugs and sprue attachments but thats only to be expected in a resin kit.

Here is the back panel - check out the Scammell Tank Transporter roof parts :)

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This part is for the rear of the chassis and its a case of spot the kit parts!

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Next it the roof part that joins the cabin to the main body, just look that grille casting

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Next is a side panel with superb panel detail

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and finally a drive wheel (edge on) plus a road wheel (side on) along with a cabin seat and the instrument panel from the cabin.

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The first job was to wash everything in soapy water and start cleaning up the pieces. The first stage of construction will involve the main chassis and preparing it for the attachment of the roadwheels.

Edited by Kallisti
Updating for the subsequent 4 years!
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I used to watch UFO for the vehicles. They did some cool models.

I think the S.H.A.D.O. track was based on this toy tank.

So, if you want to motorize it.... :winkgrin:

One of the cooler toys my friends had as a kid.

I seem to recall shooting pencils out of the thing....

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I shall watch your progress with a great deal of interest sir!

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I was busy reading your post until I read...

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Yes thats a 12" white ruler in the middle of it all!

...and there was an involuntary outburst of "What!"

I am not familiar with the television program but the subject matter is interesting. I will be following your progress.

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Yes Gerry Anderson model makers used a lot of toys as the basis of their models like the Tiger Joe tank you show and the Vickers Vigor tractor toy for the base of The Model and various other Thunderbird Pod vehicles

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Well today's progress was mostly with various needle files and razor saw cleaning up the mating edges of the pieces that will make the main body so I've spent most of the evening with a mask on to avoid breathing resin dust...

More to come...

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Everything was given a good wash in warm soapy water

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Hopefully my girlfriend won't see these photos as she's not keen on me doing any modellign activities in the kitchen :)

Once that was done, it was onto the building proper. First, the nuts that will hold bolts for the road wheels onto the chassis have been bonded into place and the wheels test fitted for alignment:

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The wheels are there only temporarily - they all need a bit of clean up work, so that will be done later. Next the cab shell comes with blank windows. These need careful cutting out so this has been done

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Clear resin inserts are provided but don't fit perfectly, there are some gaps so I'm goign to have to investigate the best way to fill those gaps. They are much bigger than the normal caps on a model canopy :)

Finally in this update, work has begin on assembling the main body. Here the rear and front panels are being epoxied onto the roof section, with the side panels taped on to provide alignment

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Today the epoxy has dried (I'm using the Ultra strong stuff, not the 5 min stuff as it takes too long to align things properly) so I'll be looking at attaching the side panels.

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Wow, 4 years have gone by in a flash! Yes, you can believe your eyes, with the current social distancing and self-isolation malarkey going on and with the sun coming out and the weather improving, I thought it was time to get this out of the box its lived in for the last 4 years and see what can be done about progressing it! My adventures with the Studio Scale Angel Interceptor last year showed me that I can built these large kits so I decided its time to get on with it again!

 

I've currently got 2 other builds on the go but the UNIT Diorama is near completion but held up by a lack of paints to finish the figures. The Thunderbird 6 Tiger Moth is a model that can be done in the evenings and when the weather is poor. The Studio Scale Shado Mobile however, if for the daytime outside :)

 

So how has the kit fared while in storage? Here is all is displayed on the garden workbench

 

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If you remember - well you can look back up the thread, some assembly owrk had taken place for the cab, chassis and main body

 

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The main body had been assembled, but lookign closely there are some gaps and steps. I'm not goign to attempt to prise the araldite joints apart, this will be a filler and sand job - ahh that takes me back to last year alriught!

 

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In particular this corner will need a lot of work

 

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You can also see the resin has discoloured and gone a bit mottled. This shouldn't be a problem once the primer and paint goes on.

 

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So thats my Easter and summer holidays taken care of :D 

 

 

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A couple of days ago I got the P-38 out and filled the gaps. A day later I got the wet and dry out and sanded it back - I'm pleased with the results as you can see:

 

This was the worst from before if you remember

 

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You can see some of the araldite acts as a filler and there there is the P-38. Similarly along that edge of the roof joint was a bit ropey, all looking much better with P-38

 

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Other areas looking much better too:

 

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Again you can see where araldite is acting as a filler in amongst the P-38. next on the agenda was to finally fit the lower panel of the main body. This was a very tricky fit and needed some considerable refining with the Dremel to get it to fit properly, even so there are significant gaps

 

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The white paint is where I was testing some primer to see if the resin needed another wash after all this time in case anything had leeched out of the resin. The rear join will need quite a bit of work as it would not fit flush

 

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and the joints at the front will need work too - this is the better of the two!

 

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Finally in this update, the panel that fits in the front section that delineates the cab had some work done on it with the dremel. There were raised bevels molded into it that were meant to engage with the cab roof piece, but due to resin shrinkage they didn't fit at all, so I thought ht easiest solution would be to remove them and rework the joint later with filler

 

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You can see what this originally looked like in this detail from an earlier pic

 

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This also needs some more dremel work to make it fit in place. Hopefully will be able to glue this into place later today...

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You must stop squandering those likes - they are precious commodity :)

 

The last couple of days have been spent filling and sanding. On Thursday, I applied the P-38 and left it overnight to cure fully, then yesterday it was all about sanding it back. its worked pretty well as you can see int he following photos:

 

Front corners:

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Whats interesting is you can see the ligher grey of the underlying resin where the sanding has removed the upper discoloured layer. I'm happy with how well thse corners turned out - of course the acid test comes later when it comes to the primer! As for that lower rear joint its filled well

 

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and this corner has reshaped reasonably well.

 

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Then toward the end of the day I put the front panel of the cab in with araldite

 

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That was left overnight to cure and earlier today I applied P-38

 

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I've just spent an hour or so in the garden exercising my right arm... NO, sanding you fool! I haven't got a pic of the results as the camera was upstairs and after the sanding I hosed the work area down to wash away stray resin and filler. It should all be dry for tomorrow where the large intake and can rear piece will be attached to the back of this cab area. Now for a cup of tea to recuperate after all that exercise!

 

 

 

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I saved a like just for you. Happy Darling?

I've just slapped a load of filler onto my latest build. Just Humbrol though, not the serious stuff. I used to get through gallons of P38 years ago on rusty cars :laugh:

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On 4/10/2020 at 3:56 AM, Pete in Lincs said:

Apparently I've run out of 'likes' yet again! So I'll have to write one instead. LIKE!

Me too so I’ll have to send you a virtual like emoji instead.  Great work Kallisti - looking forward to watching this one. 

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Finally today the sun came out and was able to get a bit more done on the Mobile. This time it was giving it a blast with the yellow primer to see just how bad the joints still were!

So starting with the upper joint of the intake to the roof

 

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I've exaggerated the contrast on most of these photos to show the faults better but this is a lot worse than it looks in the photo! As is this one

 

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This one not so bad apart form the bug gap at the bottom curve

 

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Underneath these aren't too bad

 

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This has a rather conspicuous flat spot:

 

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Gaping hole here (its where most of the water is coming from - I washed it before the yellow primer and left it to dry for several hours but there was water inside that leaked out as I was moving it aroudn for the pics

 

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This side not so bad on the join but some damage further up the side towards the top

 

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Big gap on the underside 

 

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There rear step looks okayish

 

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except for this

 

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So overall its not too bad, but will need some more P-38 applied and sanded back, In the meantime, components for the cabin have been painted, including the driver. Will need to photograph those and post later...

 

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As promised I photographed the work done on painting the figure and various pieces from inside of the cab. Here is the driver

 

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The shoes appeared to be plimsoles so I painted them a creamy off white as these are NOT trainers :) he's definitely wearing gloves but couldn't find a decent screencap to see the colour of the gloves so went with black. I need to add a wire for the microphone from the headset. I'm quite pleasesd with the face! Next is the console from inside the cab

 

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I'm not sure how much of this you will be able to see but thought I'd do a proper job on it anyway. The driver tillers will be attached to the indents in the black piece sticking out on the right. Its funny that the cars in UFO drive on the right but the tank still drives on the left :) Here is the figure along with the seats etc

 

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Next step was to print some SHADO badge decals for the figure

 

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These are 1cm across and fit the white plank resonably well but it did need a bit of touching up at the end

 

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I've just discovered that I missed a whole update about a week ago do rewind a little and we get these photos that show the progress of the attachement of the cab back panel to the body

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the gaps were pretty bad and a lot of P-38 had to be used as you can see but this sanded down reasonably well 

 

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and you've already see the outcome when the filler primer was used. The other job that was undertaken back then was to look at the rear engine/detail panel, namely this piece

 

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Now this is a complex piece made up of lots of pieces from various kits. However the main problem with this is its wrong. There are few good photos of this part of the studio model but people have done extensive research into this and there are some drawings available such as this

 

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This shows mutliple issues with the kit part: there is no jerry can in the photo, the kit part is missing the Gemini capsule piece in the upper left and so on. Some time back, after talking to Mamas  (he of the RC Mobiles you see at shows) he recommended I get the detailed parts set from Uncle Bill, aka UNCL. This is a comprehensive resin and white metal set of kit parts and other bits that were used in the studio scale mobiles.  So I acquired the set and it has a wealth of pieces, most of which I don't need as they are already molded onto the body

 

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but there are some important parts I can use such as this

 

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So I got the razor saw out and chopped off the piece into the top left to end up with  this

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which still isn't totally accurate but its an improvement. I don't want to completely rebuild this part because the scales are out by a fraction, I think the fibreclass kits that Mams produces are  slightly larger than this kit. However, there are other parts in this set I can definitely use, which leads me back into the present and the next stage...

 

When looking at the work I'll have to do to get the cab roof to fit, I've decided to backtrack a some assembly I'd completed back during my first attempt at the build, namely the roof of the cab, which has had to have pieces removed again

 

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The reddish stains are from the CY debonder I was using. During this process the flat panel that was closest to the camera here broke, but I wasn't worried as I've got better parts to replaces it with. The UNCL set contains the replacement parts which have better detail and finish

 

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The two drums come in 4 halves which have had to be glued together and you can see the filler that is fixing the problems this entails. This panel has a much more interesting pattern to it, although it did need a few mm cut from the back to make it fit. The other parts on the far side of the cab roof will also be replaced with more detailed parts. they will be left off until the cab roof is fixed on.

 

In the meantime, the main body has had an overall coat of filler primer and once that is fully cured with have a gentle overall rub down to check for any more blemishes, before moving onto the next major task, building up the joint between the cab roof and the body. 

 

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It's looking good so far. Looking forward to seeing it in the flesh at a show some time in the (not too near) future.

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The next main job is one I have been a bit trepidacious about since I decided I needed to do it! Namely rebuilding the joint between the cab roof and the body. First step in this was to complete the filling in the rest of the main body and prepare it for the next stage

 

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The next step was to then lay normal shiny sellotape down over the areas where the cab roof meets the body so that when I use filler it will not stick to the body and allow me to separate the pieces. The first stage was to reshape the cab a bit. In all the time its been in the box it seems the sides of the cab have spread a bit. The back panel show it should be 24cm wide at the junction between the back panel and the forward sloping panel, but the cab part was 26cm wide, which was why I was having trouble test fitting it in the first place!!! Its entirely possible I've made this work for myself for nothing as it might have been just a reshaping of the cab that was needed!!

 

Anyway, it was out with the hot water and carefully applied pressure to the two sides of the cab to get them to conform to a 24cm width. Then it was a matter of using Magic Sculpt to build up the areas that had wide open gaps. This was done by using sausages and smoothing them into the gaps. FInally a crude curve was applied by finger to each side to replicate the smooth transition. I forgot to take a photo of this stage, even though it got left to fully cure for 2 days! Doh!

 

Next task was sanding - this was very careful work, using coarse sanding sticks initially then finishing with 400 grit wet-n-dry . I spent most of one afternoon at this initial sanding task and once the detritus was washed off, a test fit was quite pleasing as you can see here

 

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As you can see in the photos, it was still wet from the hosepipe wash-down :) Now tihs is far from perfect - you can se a bit gap in the rear of the cab in that last photo and what doesn't show up well are the irregularities in the sides. You can also see the problem in the first pic with the uneveneess of the cab in that one side of the sticky out bit is different from the other - the angles and slopes seem to be different. This of course had to be fixed and a couple more days of priming, sanding, fillling, priming, sanding etc ended up with this

 

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If you look carefully you can see the change in slope on the right of the central bit. Not a huge amount I can do with that, the cab itself is slightly twisted out of true :( At the side, the gap has also been filled and the transition is much smoother

 

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Same on the other side

 

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There are a couple of stubborn spots, one on each side that refuse to play nice so there have been multiple rounds of priming, sanding filling etc to get to this point. In the meantime, attention switched to the cab interior which will need painting and finishing before we attach the roof. Here is it with its initial XF-53 coat

 

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and after the detail has been painted

 

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One more final round of the primer-sand-fill malarkey and it ends up looking like this

 

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and finally dry fitted to the body

 

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Yayy, result! Glad that is over now!!!! Next is to complete he cab interior, attache the roof and add the transparencies to the windows...

 

 

 

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So today I buckled down and completed the cab interior. The dashboard needed careful positioing so that it didn't impeded he cab roof going on and also so that the tillers vaguely matched where the driver's hands were. Eventually with some jiggery pokery, it went together...

 

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I added the greeblie in betweent he two seats to fill the space a bit more as it looked very empty. Here it is from another angle

 

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The glue at the front of the dashboard is a bit messy. but this will be hidden from view by the cab roof. I next need to paint the inside of the cab roof the same cab interior colour. I've also been test fitting the windows and 3 of the 4 are excellent fits while the last one - sadly the dirver's windscreen window doesn't fit properly. I've got two versions from the kit - the first set were badly case and mis-shapen and these were replaced by a newer set that fit much better, however the driver's window is a bit too large for the hole so I've had to take a sanding stick to it to shave a smidgeon off and get it to fit. Thats now been given a coat of Klear to bring it back to full shine and then they'll be fixed in place with some white glue

 

 

 

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Nice. Have you got any fingerprints left? Mine are slowly growing back. I still can't figure out how the crew were supposed to get in and out. 

Coloured lights on the rear bulkhead. A staple of Anderson shows. 

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Its done!!! The cab roof is attached! You can see that the windows have been added - the silvery blue is the final colour that will be sprayed but I gave the window frames a quick going over with it before the windows were added.

The joint between the cab roof and the body has had two sets of filler added - first a generous dollop of Mr Surfacer 500 followed (then that was dry) by some red acrylic body filler that I got as my previously favourite filler (Squadron white) has changed its composition and is now sh... rubbish!

 

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These photos are after the fillers have been sanded back and the model washed again, hence the droplets of water. I had to photograph this indoors today as the heavens opened just as I finished sanding and was clearing up! When I added the windows, I had to make sure I identified left and right as they fitted better that way round! The windows are glued in using Deluxe Materials Glue n Glaze, so the water used to wash the cab has made this show up as white again rather than clear. I had masked the inside of the windows as well as the outside while I was fitting them in to avoid getting glue smears over them. I just about managed to remember to take the internal masking off before attaching the cab!!!

 

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From the other side - you can see where the red filler is doing its job. It will probably need a couple of rounds of filler, sanding primer until I'm totally happy.

 

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These were taking about lunchtime today, since then its dried off so dodging the rain showers again I managed to give it a coat of yellow primer in the shed and we'll see what it looks like in the morning.

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With the sun shining this morning I decided to get on with the final major element of construction, attaching the chassis box to the body. If you remember all the way back 5 years ago I had previously assembled the axle guides way back then and test fitted the wheels originally, so here it is turned turtle waiting for the araldite to dry

 

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Oh whats this then? Hmm that screwdriver looks like it needs some activity...

 

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Oh look, the wheels fit! Finally we can get an idea of what this will look like when finished...

 

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especially if I turn it over! I have a choice with the bolts holding the wheels on, I can either tighten them fully or leave them a little loose which allows the road wheels to rotate...

 

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Just goes to show its a big bu... thing!

 

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Edited by Kallisti
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