Light fantastic!

Light fantastic - well maybe not quite what you were expecting but some progress with the K5350 Mustang truck fitting the various light lenses (well there are a couple left to do but most have been done) and that is fantastic because it brings this build closer to a finish! 

A couple of things happening in the picture above. Firstly is that I have masked up the door glass parts so that I can paint the metal support that separates the main winding window from the quarter light in the green body colour. It was only at this stage that I saw the level of detail with the hinges and clip to close the quarter light being incorporated into the moulding. Quarter lights were a common fitment on cars up to the early 1980s which shows my age as my first car had them! It also had a lot of rust! Secondly is that I am using Tamiya clear red paint to paint the inside of the light lenses which are the brake/side and fog lights. I would have used the clear paint in orange but despite a deep search of WMD HQ I could not find my jar of that paint although as always, I found a number of things I was looking for several weeks and month ago. I will probably find the clear orange paint in late December whilst looking for Mrs W's deeply hidden Christmas present that I will have forgotten where I stored it. However all was not lost as I had a jar of Tamiya orange paint. If you don't shake it and just unscrew the top you will usually find a very translucent part of the paint on the bottom of the screw cap. I was in luck and I used this to paint the indicators and various marker lights. I paint the inside of the mouldings which I have always found gives a good result but there is nothing wrong with painting the outside. To affix the lenses to the truck I could have used glue as there are special glues for clear type parts that are usually a PVA formulation. Ordinary plastic glues will just cloud the clear parts and it all gets very messy and a really good model can be ruined. There is another way that I use and that is to use varnish as the glue. A military modeler many years ago showed me a kit that he had built and told me that we tend to forget that varnish has adhesive properties. He had used it to his advantage in fixing many of the small components. On that basis I tried it and it works. With clear parts the varnish dries clear and does not 'cloud' or mark them unlike plastic glues or even super glue which some modelers use. Super glue may be tempting to use and in the right places it can do a great job but generally not on clear parts which it reacts with and marks them and turns them cloudy. For the K5350 truck I used Tamiya clear gloss varnish and painted it on around the area that the lens fitted into or onto and then placed the lens into the right place on the model. It now looks like this.

Just two more marker lights to fit to the side of the cab and two lenses inside the cab and that is done. The windows are next and if they go as well as the light lenses that would be fantastic!