Wolseley CP armoured car

[Murdo]

Absolutely incredible work!!! 

 

[Model Mate]

Thanks Murdo. I’m just (still!) patiently waiting for the krystal clear to dry on the headlights. I’ve had to apply about 5 coats with each taking a couple of days to go clear(ish).  Looks like I might have goofed with this -frustrating when it’s the last little bit! Maybe I should have put a flat, clear piece of plastic or something on the lights and then finished off with a blob of krystal clear to create the domed top instead of filling up the whole lamp with the stuff. Anyone have any other tips for headlights?

[Model Mate]

all done now and ready for inspection....

 

I will continue here for a bit though to cover the figures, horses and diorama. Talking of which, I started to lay it out.... The story is:

 

somewhere in England (Ashstead to be precise) a Wolsely crew is out on training manourvres. Due to the steel plate in front of the radiator, the engine overheats and malfunctions on a hot summer's day. The crew requisition a brace of horses to tow them, dismayed that the AA box they discover is unmanned and of no help.

 

...all rather unlikely I guess, but it sort of fell together as a plan. I found that AA boxes first appeared about this time (maybe a little later) and whilst researching them, found a card model set in 1/32 from "DG models" - perfect!

 

 

[Model Mate]

Diorama drama!

 

Time to get cracking on the diorama. I collected my ingredients: A4 size piece of insulation foam and matching plywood, and this lot….

 

Card model AA box plus obligatory coffee stirrers – I’ll recreate most of it in wood rather than use the card “as-is”.

Diorama drama!

 

Time to get cracking on the diorama. I collected my ingredients: A4 size piece of insulation foam and matching plywood, and this lot….

 

Card model AA box plus obligatory coffee stirrers – I’ll recreate most of it in wood rather than use the card “as-is”.

 

Cat litter – as it comes (minus the blue bits) for large rocks, crushed/ground up for smaller stones

Tea leaves – natural and dyed green (oil paint)

Green “string” from a bag of limes (probably won’t use this)

Tile grout for mud

Glycerine plus food dyes

Marjoram, thyme and parsley

Lichen and moss

Fake fur in a variety of colours

Water colour paints

Plus a gallon of diluted PVA

 

Static grass in pretty much every grade and colour and my DIY applicator – “tennis racquet” bug zapper with tea strainer.

 

Here we go!

 

The ply base and insulation board were cut to size and fixed together with double sided tape. I peeled the foil off the top surface and carved out a ditch on either side of the road using a large curved X-acto blade. The surface was scraped and contoured using this blade and Mk1 fingers to smooth over.

 

This was doused in diluted PVA (75% water). This helps to strengthen/harden the surface.

 

However….. perusing my research photos, I took a closer look at this one:

 

Not only is this the correct model of AA box, it’s the actual one I’m modelling! This raised a couple of points.

 

1.       The road looks flat and well surfaced. I can’t tell if it’s tarmac or just really smooth mud but I suspect tarmac. Certainly it’s a far cry from the mediaeval cart track I’ve made so far.

2.       There are no ditches at the roadside, in fact there’s a footpath though this does look like it’s just earth rather than tarmac

 

So I sanded back my road surface ‘till it was reasonably flat and filled in the ditch on the box side with household filler. I’d already added some tile grout and small stones which didn’t make this as easy as it might have been unfortunately. I created the footpath by brushing the filler relatively smooth. I left the ditch on the other side of the road for a bit of contoured interest.

 

Meanwhile, the AA box itself got some attention. Based on the card model template, plastic card walls were cut slightly smaller than the plans. Coffee stirrers were cut to size and superglued on.

 

The walls were stuck together and a roof and poster boards added from plastic card.

 

Then painted with humbrol satin black enamel.

 

The AA logos are going to be a major challenge. I think the best way to go will be making decals. I did a bit of research and found that clear laser-printable decal film is available that shouldn’t need sealing before application. I photographed the card model sheet and did a bit of photoshopping to get the logos and boards tidied up and scaled. An A4 sheet can fit a lot more on it than I need, so I made a few copies of the various badges and signs to give me some spares. Also, if the colour density is a bit weak (yellow over black could be a problem) I might be able to layer them up to get a thicker colour.

 

[Courageous]

A lot of prep work going into the dia.

 

Stuart

[Model Mate]

yes - and a lot of experimentation! I've never tried glycerine before, so it should be an education. Fingers crossed....

[GerryW]

This attention to detail is amazing. 

 

Gerry

[Model Mate]

Thanks Gerry - we’ll see how it goes. I’ve only made a couple of dioramas (well, not counting what I did as a kid - a piece of sandpaper for desert sand and a twig with lumps of green painted sponge glued on with UHU for a tree!) and I like to try something new each time.

I love the voyage of discovery, and using mosses and glycerine is a real experiment for me.

[Model Mate]

Green Fingers

 

I made up 4 different glycerine baths in a variety of colours. They’re 1 part glycerine to 2 parts water, with food dye (green, blue, orange and yellow) in differing mixes. I’d like to try an un-dyed one too, but I ran out of glycerine.

 

I went foraging along the towpath and came back with a variety of mosses and twigs.

 

The “trees” probably won’t be used on this project to be honest.

 

I teased out some moss, having collected 5 or 6 different varieties and removed lumps of mud, strands of grass, unhappy micro-insects and so on. I then plopped a bit of each into each of the baths. As I understand it, these need to soak for 2 or 3 days, so I popped them in a bottom drawer ‘till the weekend when I’ll drag them out and see what I’ve got. There should be way more than I need for this diorama, so hopefully I’ll end up with some spares for future use.

 

The base got a few sloshes of well-thinned water paints – green, yellow, browns and dark grey for the road. They look incredibly garish to start, but as with weathering a vehicle, they should calm down a lot when they soak in and/or dry and once further treatments are applied

 

 Once that had dried, I dribbled a load of diluted PVA on and sprinkled tile grout and crushed cat litter in selected areas. The road looked a bit dark so I brushed tile grout into the surface; a bit like using pastels/pigments.

 

Time for the first of the grass. It makes sense to me to go from short to long rather than the other way 'round – the “overlap” could cause problems otherwise. That said, if I use the fake fur, I’ll have to come up with a sequence that works by getting this in place fairly early on.

For the first application I dribbled diluted PVA on the verges and sprinkled spring, summer and autumn 2mm static grass in strategic locations, with the dry, autumn stuff at the very edges where it’s likely to dry out quicker, and the greener tones where it’s likely to be better watered. I didn’t bother with using the static applicator – these short bits look ok as they fall.

 

After doing that, it occurred to me as a good idea to get the whole of the grassed areas covered in this “thatch” with the longer, static grass applied on top.

As with much (thankfully) in this hobby, once you’ve got a bag/box/tube/jar of some stuff or other, it lasts a lifetime with the quantities we use. …anyone want to buy 4.75Kg of cat litter (I haven’t got a cat)? So it is with static grass – particularly if like me you’ve got about 20 different varieties – so I went mad and splashed out!

Before I applied this overall grass coat though, I stuck some self-adhesive (a bit old, so needed some PVA assistance) tufts of three different colours on, again working from the general premise that greener grass grows in lower, wetter areas and yellowed stuff on the high ground. The exception to this was the dark green – I notice that dark green grass tufts spring apparently out of nowhere in nature.

Again, three shades of 2mm grass were scattered over. One at a time onto wiggly snail-trails of diluted PVA that ended up covering most of the gaps between tufts.

 

At the back, behind and encroaching onto the AA box will be bushes, brambles etc., so I scattered some marjoram, thyme and parsley to represent the leaf-litter that gathers in such places. Some of it escaped further into the grass – as in life – so I happily left it there.

 

As an aside, and to finish on for now, I noticed that there’s also a lamp post in the old photo I referenced. I considered getting a miniart one, but it’s a bit pricey for what it is, and this is a scratchbuild project after all, so another element needs adding to the scratch-pile......

 

[Gorby]

That looks exceptionally good.

Just as well you're doing it as 1920/30's as otherwise, to make it believable you'd need to add the litter that lines all our roads these days.

[Model Mate]

Haha! Good point - there might still be scope for a flattened badger though!

[GerryW]

6 minutes ago, Model Mate said:

there might still be scope for a flattened badger though!

What has poor badger done to incur such a fate? 

 

Gerry

[Model Mate]

oh I've nothing at all against them - I'm very much a nature lover, but they do seem rather prone to being mowed down. Since there's been roads there's been flat badgers I reckon. I wonder if Verlinden do a flattened badger? I know they do a dead horse.

[Alpha Juliet]

Fascinating to watch this come alive!  Excellent build and thanks for sharing this

[Model Mate]

Go figure….

 

While my bushes soak, the diorama is on hold, so I thought I’d turn to the figures. I bought a couple of ICM sets a short time ago – British tank crew and British infantry. The plastic is quite rubbery, but glues well and is probably a good idea to stop the fragile bits snapping off. The detail is great for plastic figures.

 

By mixing and matching legs, heads, arms etc. I got four characters to fit in my scene.

From left to right:

·         pushing the car from the rear

·         holding the horses – his open hand will get a milliput apple as an incitement

·         tying rope onto the car’s front bumper

·         perusing the AA box and rueing not keeping up with his membership fee

 

They cleaned up really well with the back of a scalpel blade; again the soft plastic was really good for this and they’ve had a few dabs of tippex as armpit-filler. Some probably need a smear of millput too where their arms are higher than the manufacturer intended.

 

I’ve not done much figure painting, at least not for many, many years. I had a go a little while back using my usual enamels and oils (enamels for base coats and drybrushing highlights, oils for dark washes) but it’s a real pain. The paints take ages to dry so each step is separated by a day essentially and any cock-ups along the way mean rewinding and adding more days.

 

Having viewed a few tutorials on youtube, I thought it high time I joined the 21st century and gave acrylics a go. I bought a selection of 10 colours from a well-known manufacturer (starts with a “V”). Rather than go for any of their packaged combinations (do you really need 8 or 10 colours to do flesh?) I made up my own selection of various colours that I thought I’d be able to mix to get pretty much whatever I’m likely to need. I also got a thin cleaning sponge, greaseproof paper and a shallow plastic tub to make a wet palette.

 

Wow – I’m impressed, this is certainly the way to go!

 

Here’s my first test – A spare Tamiya Tiger commander. Apologies for the poor lighting, it was getting late when I took this. He’s not the finest moulding Tamiya ever produced (I think he might be nearly my age), and he looks like he’s crying, so I’ve a way to go to improve, but he’s light years better (and perhaps more importantly quicker) than I’ve managed before. I can’t wait to get on with my crew!

 

[Ron NL-S]

This is going to be superb!

A lot of planning and preparation going on and I probably missed it, but why the glycerine??

[Model Mate]

glyverine can be used to preserve plants, stopping them from rotting or drying out and losing their colour. Ironically, they tend to lose a fair bit of colour during the process of "glycerining" so having colour dye should hopefully compensate for it a bit.

[Model Mate]

Warp factor 8….

 

Back to the diorama. I dragged the mosses out of their glycerine baths and left them to dry. I’m rather impressed. The colours look pretty good. The baths were stored away; they should be good for further dunking. That said, I’ve got plenty of preserved mosses now, so it might be a while before they’re needed.

 

Here’s my crew placed approximately where they’ll end up….

 

Allow me to introduce them:

 

Captain Caruthers – somewhat dismayed and embarrassed that he allowed his AA membership to lapse.

 

Sergeant Smith – has a natural way with animals.

 

Private Dick Scratcher – not the brains of the outfit; futilely pushing the armoured car despite the handbrake being on. His spacial awareness also isn't great, tripping over a large boulder of blu-tack.

 

Private Elvis Dalrimple – way ahead of his time with a hairdo that won’t be fashionable for another forty years, but he’s good with knots.

 

They all still need their boots and belts painting. I didn’t acquire a decent dark brown amongst my recent acrylics paint purchases so I might resort to oils for this – they give a nice leather sheen anyway.

 

So all good….? Well, not quite.

 

The applications of diluted PVA has had a worrying effect of the landscape. What was initially a flat road, now seems to be a fairly deep valley.  

 

Note to self – next time, apply PVA to BOTH sides of the insulation board! I (belatedly) remember being advised to varnish both sides of thin timber wall cladding boards to avoid them warping.

 

I decided to take a deep breath and strip the insulation board from the plywood base. I’d fixed the insulation to the ply in an attempt to avoid the warping in the first place but it clearly hasn’t worked.

 

Oops –

 

Ahh well, roads crack, don’t they?

 

I stripped the foil off the back of the insulation and carved a series of knife cuts into the foam to hopefully provide some “give” and allow it to stretch bit.

 

Fresh double-sided tape was applied to the ply and the foam pressed back on. This still wasn’t quite enough, so dabs of araldite were fed into each corner and the whole base was left under a teetering pile of heavy books overnight. I think, and hope, it has worked. The tufts needed teasing back upright, but overall the damage wasn’t too bad.

 

Finally after all this salvage work, I was able to carry on with the foliage. I applied some 4mm static grass (using the static applicator) and followed this with 6mm. As before, I painted wiggly trails of diluted PVA between all the tufts and so on to stick these to. The longer stuff was placed more to the rear, under the bushes to give a bit of graduation.

 

Next came some fake fur. I snipped tufts of bright green, dark green, ochre and brown fake fur and mixed them together. From being wild, bright colours, they amalgamated into a pretty convincing blend – very much like decent quality static grass. Little bundles of this were dipped into diluted PVA and then plugged into holes pushed into the foam base at the fringes of where the bushes are going to go.

 

Lastly the bushes themselves were plopped into place, again onto puddles of diluted PVA. I gave the whole lot a blast of cheap, strong hairspray to provide a little more hold.

The results:

 

I’ll add a bit of long, dry grass and maybe blob on some paints for little bramble flowers and blackberries.

[GerryW]

Extremely impressive progress, and lots of very useful tips. 

 

Gerry

[Selwyn]

Just come to this, great build. One small point, your Vickers machine gun has holes in the front plate near the barrel, this was only seen on aircraft fitted with Vickers guns which had been converted to air cooling in flight.  The Vickers was water cooled with no holes which would ensure the cooling water would not run out!

 

Selwyn

[Model Mate]

thanks for the tip Selwyn - I may chalk this one up as a "lesson for next time" - I'll have to see; it might be an easy fix, but it's all a bit fragile now!

[Courageous]

A nice bit of dio work with a good recovery with the corner.

 

Stuart

[Vaastav]

Your attention to detail is fascinating. 

One small detail however, I suggest you change the not too bright private's name to something else. Google will be a frenemy here

[Model Mate]

He's based on reality - I recall seeing a headstone in a local graveyard that said...

 

"here lies Dick Scratcher, and his beloved wife Fanny"

 

....Honestly!

[Model Mate]

Very brief update today, as I need to get back to my city bolt-hole to carry on with the AA box, horses and lamp post – it’s a bit tricky working on a diorama when it’s spread over two counties!

 

I bought some very cheap (three for a quid) paintbrushes and snipped off a few tufts of bristles.

 

These tufts were dipped in diluted PVA and shoved into holes in the base. I also mixed some neat PVA with pink and black paint and dabbed on some blackberries and flowers.

 

I think that’s about it for the landscape. I’ll probably run a little green water colour over the dry tufts as they’re a bit too dry at the moment and paint a wobbly tar repair over the road crack, but other than that I’m calling this done.

 

The chaps got their belts and so on painted, and I applied a black acrylic wash over them. These acrylics seem to be ok for what I call a slosh-wash, but dry too quickly for a detailed pin wash. I’ve “Kleared” them, so I can now give them a very thin dark brown oil pin wash and light tan drybrush before a final matt coat. Their uniforms were also starting to “go through at the knees” if you know what I mean, so the klear gives them a bit of protection. Here’s how Caruthers and Smith look now.

 

They're not brilliant, and I'm still very much in the learning phase for figures, but they look ok from a distance.

 

Regarding the Vickers gun, I think I'm going to leave it as it is - it all becomes part of the (unlikely) story.... not only has their engine overheated, but also their gun which they foolishly procured from an RAF stores manager; Milo Minderbinder senior.