Mercedes-Benz 1628s SWB Tanker

[JeroenS]

It was time to tackle the tank today. I had been toying with the idea of using my Silhouette cutter, and I did. It can easily cut 0.25 mm sheet styrene, so I did some calculations, drew the basic shape of the tank: 

 

 

and had the machine cut a whole bunch more!

 

Then, I glued 3 of these together, making 9 "ribs" (well, 7 ribs, a front and a back) of .75 mm which is quite sturdy. Then, I sort of glued a box in between the ribs to create a basic frame, like this. 

 

 

The 2 small pieces on top were eventually replaced by 1 down the middle, after I had all the ribs in place. The lining up of the ribs was done by eye, ruler and triangle, and it worked out reasonably well. A little bit of "squaring up" is needed, but not much. 

 

This is the whole thing. 

 

 

Sitting on the truck like so. It will be higher, because there's no chassis yet. 

 

 

 

 

The plan is to skin it by wrapping 0.5 mm sheet around it, which I'm going to try and heat up a little bit (50 Celcius should do it, or so I've read) in the oven before performing the procedure. 

[Bengalensis]

I have been looking forward to this stage of build! Nice! This will be interesting to follow.

[Stickframe]

I am not familiar with a silhouette cutter, but it does nice work!  this is looking really nice! 

[Anteater]

I'd never heard of a silhouette cutter either. Looks a useful bit of kit and not horrendously expensive at the cheaper end. Pretty much essential for this I would have thought, wouldn't fancy accurately cutting all those ribs by hand! Looking forward to seeing you add the outer skin. 

[dnl42]

Nice work! Which model Silhouette do you have? My Silhouette Portrait (first) version can only score 10mil plastic, I have to finish the cut with an exacto. 

[JeroenS]

5 hours ago, dnl42 said:

Nice work! Which model Silhouette do you have? My Silhouette Portrait (first) version can only score 10mil plastic, I have to finish the cut with an exacto. 

Thanks, I have the Portrait 3. It does the job perfectly with the .25 sheet, the shapes come loose easily, sometimes even remain on the backing sheet. For the .5 sheet, it can only score the cuts, like you said yours does for the .25 sheet. Maybe it will do deeper cuts but I'm reluctant to try. Maybe I'll try it when the blade needs replacing anyway.

[JeroenS]

So, in between work I set about wrapping the tank frame with .5 mm sheet. I chose to do it in steps and (carefully) heat up the plastic with a heat gun, which worked ok. I started out by glueing a flat side onto the sheet first. 

 

 

I didn't even think of this when I decided on the measurements of the tank, but it fits the sheet perfectly. 

 

 

I would have liked a little more margin, but I'm glad it's not just a bit wider than the sheet. 

 

Various stages of glueing and clamping. 

 

 

 

With sometimes disappointing results! Ouch. 

 

 

I put a little extra thin cement into the outer join and apparently I shouldn't have done that. I've had this happen with thinner sheet, but not with .5 mm. Too much tension I guess. Some filling is needed here as well, I have been able to repair it some since I took the photo. 

 

 

So this is the completed (but not finished) item. I'm leaving the seam on top because there will be a structure there, containing the filling points and such. 

 

 

This means that the cracked part will be here. 

 

 

I'll repair this as best I can, then put thin sheet over it, to make a base for the supports or something. I'll figure something out. I'm not redoing the entire tank, I can tell you that. There's some humps which I'll sand as flat as possible, and some dents which I'll fill a little bit, but all in all I'm reasonably happy with this. I will probably add sheet on both ends to reinforce everything there and make it look a little nicer. 

 

 

 

 

[klubman01]

Great tank construction technique, but a shame that the crack occurred.  0.5mm card is usually quite flexible in my experience.  I'm sure you will find a way to repair the damage.  

Trevor

[Bengalensis]

That's good work. The problems can be rectified with a little work, you will fix that.

[JeroenS]

11 minutes ago, klubman01 said:

Great tank construction technique, but a shame that the crack occurred.  0.5mm card is usually quite flexible in my experience.  I'm sure you will find a way to repair the damage.  

Trevor

I think that, because I did this in a couple of iterations, the heating / cooling / heating / cooling / etc cycle may have contributed to this, it seemed like the plastic was becoming less flexible over time. 

4 minutes ago, Bengalensis said:

That's good work. The problems can be rectified with a little work, you will fix that.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Jörgen 🙂 

[keefr22]

What Jörgen said....!!

 

If you can scratchbuild a tank as nice as that you'll make that repair invisible!

 

Excellent work Jeroen!

 

Keith

[JeroenS]

I'll show you what I've been up to with the tank repairs. I spent all day yesterday, a couple of minutes at a time, to make the repairs, a lot of curing was involved so I took my time. 

 

To refresh your memories, this is what I was repairing: 

 

 

So first I thought I could somehow glue the tear back in. 

 

 

While this worked for the part at the edge of the tank, I realized more drastic measures were needed. 

 

 

I then cut out some more to make the a more evenly spaced hole and backfilled with .25 sheet. 

 

 

I let this dry, then cut it to just the right length to fiddle the other side in, and it seated in there nicely. 

 

 

Then I laminated the gap from the outside with .5 mm sheet to match the outer skin. The little strips were easy to bend to the right curve. I made sure to use the regular glue instead of the extra thin!

 

 

When that was dry I put a whole lot of dissolved styrene on the gaps. 

 

 

This was left to cure overnight. I sanded this morning before work. 

 

 

And I'm happy with this so far. The whole tank is a bit wobbly in places so I'm going to have to add some visual elements to it to distract from that a little bit. I have some ideas. 

 

In the meantime, I worked on the other side, putting a new "cover" on the other end. 

 

 

The .5 mm sheet was then cut to size and the edges were sanded so we'll be looking at a nice even surface.

 

 

This will now need to be done for the other end as well. Then, I'll give it a shot of filler primer and see what we have going on!

 

 

[Hamden]

 

Nice save on the tank as we knew you would! 

Looking forward to seeing it in paint now

 

 

  Stay safe        Roger

 

[klubman01]

Great recovery.

Trevor

[Pete in Lincs]

For curves I always lightly score the card and it bends of its own accord. Glue in place and apply a skim of filler when dry. Sand  smooth, et voila!

[keefr22]

Excellent save Jeroen!

 

Keith

[Bengalensis]

It's looking promising!

[Stickframe]

You certainly took the problem head on and saved it!  I understand that you might have some small imperfections where the sheet material attaches to the ribs, but I wonder with paint, or primer, if the viewer would notice?  I like your idea of adding bits - maybe ladder or various connecting points, lights etc, so when done, likely hard to notice any irregularities.

 

Cheers

Nick 

[JeroenS]

9 hours ago, Stickframe said:

You certainly took the problem head on and saved it!  I understand that you might have some small imperfections where the sheet material attaches to the ribs, but I wonder with paint, or primer, if the viewer would notice?  I like your idea of adding bits - maybe ladder or various connecting points, lights etc, so when done, likely hard to notice any irregularities.

My thoughts exactly! I'm adding stuff to hide the worst crimes, and the fact that the plastic is a bit wobbly, I don't mind that. That's more or less what an old tank would look like. I will probably paint this thing all nice, but it will be an older tanker, saved from somewhere and restored, because that's what we do at Van Dordt. Sometimes 🙂 

 

Anyway, I glued a couple of strips of thin sheet on the bottom. 

 

 

 

This is where the supports from the chassis will be mounted. The former gap and its repair is now completely invisible. 

 

I've started the ... well, I don't know what to call it, at the top of the tank. There was a gap there, so first I covered that with .5 mm sheet, which makes the bottom of the thing where the filler caps (?) will be. Then I put up the wall around it. 

 

 

Needs a little filler but not much. I'll make a small horizontal edge around the top, and probably add in a few ribs down the length of it. Then add in the tanker hardware. 

 

The tank itself should now be waterproof so I can spray primer on the bulk of it and wet sand. 

[richellis]

Looking good, if you look at an older tank it will often have some ripples and dents in the skin 👍

[JeroenS]

I figured out how to mount the tank. Making the chassis for it was easy enough. 

 

 

The square plates will get some bolts, but they already help keep the tank's chassis in place. 

 

Next, I took some square tube, cut some pieces to the right length and heated them using a small candle. I bent these heated pieces over the bottom of the tank, hence the alu foil for as a precaution against melting. 

 

 

This gave me 3 more or less similar pieces. I closed of their ends and glued them to the tank, really pushing them on to create a good fit. 

 

 

 

I needed to do a little more work because the tank would be too tall, sitting on the mounts like this. 

 

 

So I measured and cut out the middle pieces, leaving the bottom piece of tube intact. 

 

 

I'm pleased with the result. 

 

 

I'll move the tank forward just a hair more. It's time to work on the rear end, and some tanker stuff of course.

 

By the way, I'm thinking of painting the tank fully white, probably with dark blue lettering. I don't have much white stuff in the cabinet, it will make a nice change. 

[keefr22]

That looks really good Jeroen, more impressive scratchbuilding! A white tank sounds good!

 

Keith

[klubman01]

That looks really good!

Trevor

[Bengalensis]

This is progressing very nicely! The added detail is making a lot of difference,

 

Now I hope you don't mind (actually I know you don't mind) but one thing you could still add, based on the photos so far seen, is more radious between the tank mantle and gables, and some dome or curve to the gables. One of the things I work with is design, construction and drawing of various tanks for storing and/or transporting hazardous liquids, so I can't help noting. Perhaps cutting gables from 3-4 mm thick material would enable some curvature and radious to be added? A bit like the photo you have from the museum. It's a crucial element in tank gable design. If it's too late or too problematic work I might be the only one to notice, and it's still very nice modelling.

[JeroenS]

8 hours ago, Bengalensis said:

This is progressing very nicely! The added detail is making a lot of difference,

 

Now I hope you don't mind (actually I know you don't mind) but one thing you could still add, based on the photos so far seen, is more radious between the tank mantle and gables, and some dome or curve to the gables. One of the things I work with is design, construction and drawing of various tanks for storing and/or transporting hazardous liquids, so I can't help noting. Perhaps cutting gables from 3-4 mm thick material would enable some curvature and radious to be added? A bit like the photo you have from the museum. It's a crucial element in tank gable design. If it's too late or too problematic work I might be the only one to notice, and it's still very nice modelling.

Thanks Jörgen! I'm not 100% sure what you mean by gables, but my guess is you mean the front and back walls?

 

I've noticed the domed shape on the tanks I've seen, but I've more or less ignored it because I have had no ideas how to do that in a nice way! But you're right, it could definitely still be added, and now would be the time. 

 

Could you explain what you mean by "more radious between the tank mantle and gables"? I think you're talking about 2 separate things, right? The domed shape and the radious thing.