B-Type Military Omnibus (Battle bus) MiniArt 1/35

[busnproplinerfan]

19 hours ago, diablo rsv said:

It's quite a step up from the old Airfix kit, the level of detail is excellent. They do have the civilian version as well which is certainly a lot more colourful than this one. 

Thanks for the tip re the glass. I would imagine the tempered glass covers would be virtually impossible to cut though. I am intending to use microscope slide cover-slips they are exceptionally thin but can be cut. The intention is to show a couple of broken windows and the rest will be boarded up. Apparently soldiers frequently broke the windows with their rifles and equipment so in the end they just removed the glass and placed wooden boards on the outside. I guess it also afforded them a little protection from stray shellfire.   

Slides would work. I saw a 30something derelict car model with the glass from the cell phone but forgot how the guy said he cut it.

[Biggu]

Absolutely  stunning build, the engine is awesome !  I'm lovin this...

[diablo rsv]

Thank you very much! @Biggu

 

I've made a start on the lower deck and it's really nice to work with some less finicky parts. I painted the floor boards and benches with a mix of deck tan and a touch of grey. A coat of the red/brown body colour was applied over this and then gently sanded away to simulate areas of wear. I know these vehicles in their civilian life were repainted regularly so I imagine the paint would have been fairly thick but considering the conditions they faced in military use I would have thought some wear would have been inevitable. 

 

 

I will add washes and plenty of dirt and grime at a latter stage.

The body parts fit together pretty well but there is quite a seem where the front and rear ends meet the sides.

 

 

Most of the builds that I have seen of these kits have left these seams but looking at images of the original and London transport's restoration they really need to be filled.

 

 

I stuck the kits plastic window parts onto some tape and then used these to mask off the interior.  Cutting the tape slightly oversize allowed the window to be just pressed into place.

 

  

 

Next up is the upper deck, hopefully I can get started on that in the next few days.

 

Wayne  

 

 

[Bullbasket]

Nice work Wayne. The seats and floor look really good.

 

John.

[Ozzy]

Fantastic work Wayne, I can't wait to start mine.

[diablo rsv]

Thank you John and Ozzy. 

The upper deck and staircase have now been assembled without too many problems. I had thought I may have to replace a lot of the railings with brass rod due to the difficulties with cleaning them up. However that wouldn't have been that simple either so I just had to knuckle down and do the best I could with files, knives and various sanding mediums. Luckily I only had one casualty that just seemed to fall apart at the slightest touch.

 

I have managed to glue it all back together and the repair isn't noticeable.

The body was roughly painted in it's civilian livery in the same way that I did with the chassis. The intention is that in areas of wear the original colours will show through the khaki. In reality it probably wasn't worth the effort of this approach however I no longer feel that I need to build the civilian version as was my intent. 

 

 

 

The next step is to apply some hairspray and the Khaki paint.

 

Wayne  

[Ozzy]

Nice, are you going to add any of the advertising? I'm planning on keeping mine red before they were given a khaki with a few smashed windows.

[edjbartos]

You have done a brilliant job so far, miniart plastic seems to be a bit softer than others and just seem to break just by looking at them. Its all coming along really well.

 

Ed

[diablo rsv]

1 hour ago, Ozzy said:

Nice, are you going to add any of the advertising? I'm planning on keeping mine red before they were given a khaki with a few smashed windows.

Thanks Ozzy.

Yes, I am going to add a couple of the posters on the inside on the lower deck and maybe a couple on the upper deck, I will try to show them worn and torn. As for the outside I am going to to assume most of those were removed before the Khaki was applied.

I will use something to board up some of the windows but like you I want to have a couple of broken ones. 

[diablo rsv]

1 hour ago, edjbartos said:

You have done a brilliant job so far, miniart plastic seems to be a bit softer than others and just seem to break just by looking at them. Its all coming along really well.

 

Ed

Thanks Ed,

The plastic is definitely on the soft side but to be honest I think that has helped in the cleaning up of the multitude of sprue attachment points.

I spoke too soon about the repair on the rail that did break. It fell apart during painting and a piece has disappeared so I have fashioned one from brass rod. Unfortunately it now makes the other rails look a little poor by comparison. As they are mostly getting painted over I will live with it but if I was doing the civilian version I think it would be better to use brass where possible.  

 

  

[Ozzy]

8 hours ago, diablo rsv said:

Thanks Ozzy.

Yes, I am going to add a couple of the posters on the inside on the lower deck and maybe a couple on the upper deck, I will try to show them worn and torn. As for the outside I am going to to assume most of those were removed before the Khaki was applied.

I will use something to board up some of the windows but like you I want to have a couple of broken ones. 

 

Someone at my local model club had mentioned, the boarding on the Windows was protection from the elements as over time the troops rifles had smashed the windows. He also said there was one bus or vehicle kept red by its new owners ( the RFC) as it allowed them to know they were at the right airfield. I've got a few coffee stirrers lying about I was going to board a couple of the Windows up with, I had the same problem with various linkages on the European tram luckily they were underneath. What size brass rod did you use?

[vaoinas]

Tremendous build, this one.
The paint job on the civilian colors looks a bit too good to cover with the khaki. But it's probably worth it once khaki is chipped.

Edited August 12, 2020 by vaoinas

[Terry1954]

A superb build developing here. I very much like the idea of applying the original in service colour scheme and then overpainting with the military khaki, allowing some minor wear and tear to reveal the original colours.

 

I'm a bit of a closet bus fan and am fancying a 1919 London red bus version myself!

 

Terry

[diablo rsv]

On 11/08/2020 at 07:57, Ozzy said:

 

Someone at my local model club had mentioned, the boarding on the Windows was protection from the elements as over time the troops rifles had smashed the windows. He also said there was one bus or vehicle kept red by its new owners ( the RFC) as it allowed them to know they were at the right airfield. I've got a few coffee stirrers lying about I was going to board a couple of the Windows up with, I had the same problem with various linkages on the European tram luckily they were underneath. What size brass rod did you use?

I hadn't heard of the RFC one but the Navy had around 70 busses that were to be used by the Marines. These were the MET Daimler busses and due to lake of time they retained their blue and white livery complete with advertising and destination boards. They would make an interesting subject to go along side the LGOC B-type bus but although similar in design I think a modification to the Miniart kit would be beyond me and as far as I  am aware the Daimler bus hasn't been kitted. 

I haven't quite decided on the window boarding yet, some buses had individual windows boarded up and others had the planks along the whole length of the windows. The coffee stirrers would be ideal but I think I have some wooden strips from a model ship that I was building. 

I used 0.8mm rod for the rail at the back and the linkages  but were I to replace the upper rail I think I would go with the 1.0mm

 

Wayne

[diablo rsv]

10 hours ago, vaoinas said:

Tremendous build, this one.
The paint job on the civilian colors looks a bit too good to cover with the khaki. But it's probably worth it once khaki is chipped.

 

10 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

A superb build developing here. I very much like the idea of applying the original in service colour scheme and then overpainting with the military khaki, allowing some minor wear and tear to reveal the original colours.

 

I'm a bit of a closet bus fan and am fancying a 1919 London red bus version myself!

 

Terry

Thank you very much.

Had it been staying in its civilian colours I would have taken a lot more care with the masking up but it certainly does look smart in the red. Maybe given time I will be tempted to build the civilian bus.

I was starting to feel that it was too much effort to do it this way considering how little of the original paint will be seen and maybe using sponges and fine brushes to do the chipping would have been easier but it would have been hard to replicate the areas where the surface paint had been rubbed away. Now that I have applied the top coat and done some of the wear and tear I'm pretty happy with the results so perhaps that was the best way to proceed.

 

Wayne 

[diablo rsv]

The Khaki top coat has now been applied over a layer of hairspray. I applied some wear using various brushes, cocktail sticks and sanding sponges. I've kept it relatively restrained at the moment but I may add more later on in the build.

 I cut some stencils from the scanned decal sheet using the excellent Silhouette Portrait desktop cutting machine and sprayed the markings on. I prefer this method where possible to avoid the risk of carrier film showing. This method means that I don't really need to apply any extra layers of varnish. The markings were then sanded back slightly to give a faded appearance. 

   

 

As was mentioned earlier the windows of these buses were often broken by soldiers equipment and I guess having a lot of glass around in a war zone wasn't ideal so they were removed and boarded over with planks of wood. The wood grain in the plastic ones provided in the kit were a little over done for my liking and in most of the photos I could find they seemed to use five boards rather than the six on the plastic items. I used some wood veneer strips to replicate the boards. I assumed that the inside faces wouldn't have been painted so I just gave them some washes with oil paint to age and dirty them up a little.

 

 

I then glued them to the bus with some CA and added some nail marks with a compass point.

 

 

 

The next job is to add some glass and and a bit of dirt to the inside areas.

 

Wayne

[Bullbasket]

Excellent job Wayne. Nice work with the stencils.

 

John.

[edjbartos]

Great work on the stencilling and the wooden boards, it’s all looking really great...

 

Ed

[vaoinas]

Absolutely top grade work here. 

Markings look awesome as do the wooden boards. Very realistic.

 

 

Kristjan

[diablo rsv]

 

On 16/08/2020 at 07:45, Bullbasket said:

Excellent job Wayne. Nice work with the stencils.

 

John.

 

 

On 16/08/2020 at 08:12, edjbartos said:

Great work on the stencilling and the wooden boards, it’s all looking really great...

 

Ed

 

On 16/08/2020 at 09:52, vaoinas said:

Absolutely top grade work here. 

Markings look awesome as do the wooden boards. Very realistic.

 

 

Kristjan

Thank you all for your kind words.

[diablo rsv]

I used some microscope cover slips to replace the plastic windows. You can see from the photo the difference in the thickness. I had originally planned to just use them where the broken windows would be but in the end I decided to replace them all.

 Using the originals as a template the glass can be gently scored using a tungsten tipped engineers scribe and then snapped to size. 

The windows were then glued in place with VMS's Transpa Fix. 

 

 

Breaking the glass was a little harder than I thought, after a couple of attempts though I got a result that I'm pretty happy with. It would be easy to get carried away with smashing windows but in the end I decided on just one broken and one cracked.

 

I added some dirt and dust to the inside using some pigments and a couple of washes. I wanted a dry appearance rather than wet mud everywhere and again I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It wasn't easy to photograph the result accurately though.

If I was going to add some passengers I would probably go with some wet muddier conditions but as far as I'm aware there aren't really any suitable figures available.

 

It's starting to feel like I'm getting there now with this build. Time to start putting all the sub assemblies together and tackle the external weathering.

 

Wayne

[edjbartos]

Brilliant work here, absolutely love those windows, i was going to say cracking job!

 

Ed

[Bullbasket]

Great job with the glass. I've still got a load of those slides from when I used to build model railways. The appearance is far better than clear plastic.

 

John.

[diablo rsv]

 

On 18/08/2020 at 22:11, edjbartos said:

Brilliant work here, absolutely love those windows, i was going to say cracking job!

 

Ed

 

On 19/08/2020 at 08:05, Bullbasket said:

Great job with the glass. I've still got a load of those slides from when I used to build model railways. The appearance is far better than clear plastic.

 

John.

Thank you again Ed and John,

I got the idea for the glass slides from a model of an old building that somebody was building on YouTube. It's definitely worth checking in on the railway modellers, they often have some great tips and tricks.

 

Wayne

  

[Ernst]

Awesome precision work on an exceptional vehicle.

Cheers,

Ernst.