Finally!

Yes - finally! I have completed the 5350 Mustang truck! Its been a long journey and I have been distracted from finishing so many times but it is done! I always said I was impressed by the way this kit had been designed and the fit of the parts and it is a credit to Zvezda. Obviously there is some licensing issue with the trucks real manufacturer Kamaz as the name plate on the front has been amended to 'Kama3' (see photo 5) which is no doubt sufficient to keep lawyers happy! It amused me anyway!

A mild time and a glazing time.

One of the problems with this very mild weather in November is that you feel you should be taking advantage of it and doing activities and jobs outside rather than sitting inside in the warmth doing model making. One of the activities that has benefitted is my cycling. I completed 5201 miles this year last Saturday the 13th November, some 6 weeks ahead of my target! Hopefully I can add a few hundred more before the years end. Job wise the garden is confused with bedding plants still in full flower and needing pruning and I am looking at my patch of grass that is laughingly referred to as a lawn and thinking that could do with a cut. Hmmmm. Maybe tomorrow! 

In the meantime modelling has been an evening activity and so progress is slow. However I have carried on with work on the K5350 Mustang truck - amazingly given my usual butterfly approach to projects! It is so near being finished I really need to focus myself on finishing this build instead of it becoming another of my shelf queens!

The cab has already had a wash of dilute grey paint following a similar pattern to that I did on the chassis and cargo bed. The pictures show this straight after being applied so it does look a little stark but dills and fades as it dries.

Tonight I fitted the glazing. This was fixed in place with Deluxe Materials Glue 'n' Glaze which is similar to PVA but specifically formulated to glue transparencies in models without damaging them or showing once dry. I have already masked the area that the windscreen wipers would clear and given that the door windows would be cleaned as they were wound down and up they too have been masked. This should mean that once all the weathering is complete the masking can be removed leaving clean glazing in the areas that should be clean. The mirrors have also been attached and the cab is almost finished!

 

 

Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea!

Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea! The final line of that fantastic film, the original 1972 and in my view best, Italian Job and if you want to reacquaint yourself with that final line in the final scene, you can see it here.. 

What that line has to do with this blog may appear somewhat strange but let me explain. Tuesday saw me at the Rocks by Rail Museum where the task for the day was a continuation of digging ballast out from between the track so that it could be cleaned. The work that day would see the end to that section of line. Having pick axed and shovelled my way through several tons of the stuff over the past few visits I was pleased that this would be the last day for a while anyway! Preparing my back for a session with the pick axe it was suddenly that Michael Caine moment when someone said - Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea! Unlike Mr. Caine who had no idea what to do, this idea was actually a good one but unfortunately somewhat late in the overall job. Instead of using the pick axe, why didn't we use the Kango? A Kango is a sort of electric pneumatic drill and makes jobs a lot less back breaking! Great idea and it worked well and would have saved so much effort on all the other days when we did not use it! Doh and even double Doh! Anyway by lunchtime we had finished. Unfortunately I had to go home to take delivery of Mrs W's Christmas present (if she is reading this I trust that has bought me some bonus points!) so I missed out on the afternoons work of putting some clean ballast back which involved moving locomotives and ballast wagons. Oh well! There will be other times!

The Kango arrives!

Nearly done.

Back at WMD HQ the Man Cave AKA The Room of Gloom had a bit of a clean and tidy up today as it was getting somewhat reminiscent of a waste receiving depot. I tend to work in a mess on my things and much as I try to change it just does not work for me to be tidy model making. Strangely, and much to Mrs W's annoyance, if I am cooking, things get put away as soon as finished with and dirty utensils washed as soon as used, usually whilst Mrs. W still actually has a need for them hence her annoyance! Whilst tidying I came across the K5350 Mustang truck and I thought I really do need to finish it. So this evening it has reappeared on the workbench. All that remains is for the cab to be weathered and a few parts including the glazing attached. The first thing I did was to find the windscreen and mask out the area that the windscreen wipers would clean. In general you don't see even the most dirty vehicle with a windscreen that at least shows evidence of the wipers having been used. A piece of masking tape, a compass cutter and a bit of measuring saw the mask cut and in place.

Here the winscreen has been covered with a piece of masking tape.

The compass cutters are simply a compass with the pencil replaced with a cutting blade - very handy for cutting circles! The mask is in place and I had to amend the bottom as it is that long since I did one of these I forgot that the bottom off the wiper arc would be flat and not curved as I first cut it - Doh!

 Next up was to commence the weathering of the cab. Just like the cargo body and chassis the weathering starts with washed of dilute greys and brown paints. As I said in a previous post it is like watching paint dry waiting for the washed to do their thing. However given the way I do models it may be weeks before I come back to this again! 

 

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! 

The wonders of decals!

 

The K5350 now has decals applied! Small steps but about 2 hours work for this job which seems a long time but sometimes you have to take your time. The areas where the decals were to be applied had been sprayed in a gloss varnish a few days earlier. The gloss varnish gives a smooth surface for the decal to sit on. Leave a matt paint finish and the decal, especially the carrier film around the edge of the decal, are likely to 'silver'. This is where air becomes trapped under the decal and shows it self as a silvery mark. Get a gloss varnish coat under the decal and you are well on your way to successful application! Famous last words! One of the other issues that can affect decals is where they have to conform to a raised or depressed surface. As the picture shows above the decals are not on a flat surface. Decals are not very good at doing much else than laying flat. If you want to get them to settle around the contours of the model you really need a decal softener. Apply this to the decal once in place and leave alone to do its work you will find that the decal almost magically molds itself to the surface contours. My softener of choice is Micro Sol but there are are others about which no doubt work equally well.

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Another thing that I have learnt over the years is to make sure you have a fresh blade in your modelling knife when you cut the decals from their sheet. Use a metal straight edge as well and keep fingers out of the way - I talk from the experience of not following this advice! 

There are many different thoughts on the best way to wet the decal to break the bond with the backing sheet. Some people leave the decal in a saucer of water and wait for the decal to almost float off. That is one method but if the decal does float off the backing sheet it becomes a job worthy of several swear jar contributions to then actually get it on the model in one piece and without it folding under itself. My preferred method is to just dip the decal and backing sheet nito some water for a few seconds and then just leave it on the workbench. The water will still do its job and after a few minutes the decal will be loose of the backing sheet and ready to apply.

I will let the decals fully set and then apply some matt varnish to give them some protection.

Cab painted.

 Yes I can confirm that the K5350 cab is painted! Finally! Its done! Finished - well the painting anyway.

The picture sequence below shows my untidy but as I would call it, functional masking, the cab and doors in primer (don't tell Mrs Woody they are posed on the cooker top which I need to now clean), then with additional 'functional masking to allow the green to be airbrushed and finally the finished cab. Note I had already painted the headlight units in silver so a ball of Blu Tack (other similar type products are available but this just happened to on the desk at the time) was applied to each one. Being involved in other matters over the past few days has given the paint time to harden before I give it a coat of gloss varnish to allow the decals to be applied and then sealed with a coat of matt varnish. Following that the glazing, mirrors, lights and windscreen wipers need fitting and some weathering to match the chassis and cargo body. Then it will be finally complete!

I won't tell you how I dropped the cab on the way back to the man cave AKA The Room of Gloom but it only broke a couple of pieces off and I must have been that relaxed that the swear jar did not need topping up!

Mirror, mirror on the workbench......

If you think that the K5350 Mustang truck model build is dragging on I must agree! However in my defense I keep getting dragged off into other things. Today it was a trip to the scrap yard to get rid of some scrap metal and than this afternoon cutting a very over grown hedge for a neighbour. However I have assembled the mirrors for the truck which are now on my work bench. Zvezda kindly supply some self adhesive ready cut reflective sheets to put on the mirror to imitate the real mirror glass. Looking at the mirror arms and their fragile nature made me think that to put those cut outs on once the mirrors were mounted to the truck was likely to end in a large contribution to the swear jar! I therefore devised a cunning plan of painting the front faces of the mirror bodies first which would give the rubber surround, then mount the reflective sheets and then mount the mirror bodies to the mirror arms. I could then either mount the arms to the doors and paint or paint separately and then mount to the door. Either way some masking tape on the reflective sheet will protect it from any painting. I will have to see if it all works out and will I be the fairest of them all???? I am sure Mrs. Woody has an answer for that!

In plain sight!

I have completed the chassis of the Zvezda K5350 Mustang truck for some weeks ago. This took many hours of work. The chassis has stood in front of me for hours on my modelling bench. I have spent many hours adding washes and weathering to it and even spending time watching the paint dry! Why then, having spent all this time looking at it, holding it and working on it, did it take the fitting of two jerry cans to the cargo body to realise that the battery box and mounted air tanks on it was upside down! In best Homer Simpson voice - Dooh! This mistake was in plain sight for weeks but I missed it - just goes to show you that even after years of modelling you can still get it fundamentally wrong! However I did manage to gently break the two joints of the battery box to the chassis and re-glue the right way round!

Above the battery box on the wrong way round so that the cargo body would not fit once some jerry cans had been fitted.

Having managed to gently break the joint it was time to put right my long standing error!

Now the right way round and the body fitted with the jerry cans in place.

The cab is almost ready for full external painting and once that is done there are really only mirrors, light lenses and decals to fit and the final weathering - Great!

Watching paint dry!

A gap of a couple of days since the last post as I have literally been watching dry on the K5350 Mustang Truck. Well there has also been some work on getting the last pieces of the cab fitted so it can be painted up but a lot of time has been taken up in applying 'washes' to the chassis and cargo body. I use very diluted brown and grey Vallejo paint. This is then painted on to the model and then I let gravity takes its course as the paint pigment gets trapped in nooks and crannies of the model as well as dulling the overall paint finish. As it is very dilute it does take a long time to dry hence you feel as though you are sat there watching paint dry. Its all very therapeutic though and you can get lost in time if you decide to intervene on gravity's effects by using the paint brush to start making streaking effects or adding paint here or taking it away from somewhere else. The idea however is to make the truck look well used - no shampoo and wax every Sunday for a working truck like this! In essence applying a dilute coat of paint like this is trying to emulate the environment the vehicle drives through. Take a car out on a wet day and it comes back home looking dirty. Rain itself contains dirt, the spray off the road has dirt and even the air itself can have dirt in it. All of this dirt just loves to deposit itself on vehicles - especially if you have just washed it! Something I have explained to Mrs. Woody on many occasions when she has deemed her car needs washing and I have tried to get out of it by pointing out that it will only get dirty again. Never works!

The cargo body started out looking like this 

and now looks like this

Still a way to go but you can almost feel that ingrained grime on the paintwork. 

Whilst I was waiting for the paint to dry I did have a look at some of my previous cherished models or as Mrs. W would say junk, which are beginning to reside on the shelves in the man cave AKA the Room of Gloom. Built about 18 years ago this is an Italeri 1/24 scale DAF 95XF Super Cab. It was a simple build as there was no engine to construct and it was one of Italeri's first ventures into their 'New Concert' of simplified truck kits. There were a few others but they were not popular with modelers and I am pleased to say all the new releases over the past few years have been full kits with engines and gearboxes.

Its hitched up to an Italeri Schmitz Dumper Trailer which is an impressively big model. Built in 2013 I recall managing to build the majority of the kit in a day! Wow! If only I could do that now. I can see from the photo that I need to get the duster out. Unlike the K5350 Mustang Truck this truck and trailer are cared for! 

Right back to the paint drying channel!
  

The Dirty Seven

This is not a WMD cheapskate rip off of The Dirty Dozen film! Mrs Woody holds the purse strings and me entering the World of making films is not something that would pass the funding analysis. Anyway this evening I left Mrs. W pursuing a handbag website and had a few minutes to do a bit more on the K5350 truck. Before finally assembling the wheels I need to do a bit more weathering. Trying to give the wheels that dirty look was done with the aid of a very dilute coating or two of Vallejo Earth colour. The idea is that being dilute it will be drawn into the nooks and crannies as well as toning the overall look of the tyres a bit further. They will need to dry overnight and you can see in the phot above they are still damp.

I also had time to put the seats, steering wheel and dashboard in the cab so that is almost complete. Not entirely happy with the weathering inside yet. I did use a Humbrol Dust Wash which took about 3 days to dry and still is shiny. I have splashed a bit of the dilute earth mix (almost sounds like the old advert for Brute aftershave with Henry Cooper and Barry Sheen - Splash it all over! - See the advert on YouTube by clicking here) that the tyres had in the cab to see if it will tone it all down. I will wait to see what tomorrow brings - possibly Mrs W's new handbag! Antway off to see if there is a Blood Moon again tonight as there was a great one last night.

  

Getting dirty!

No, not adult humour but time to start weathering the chassis of the K5350 truck. Over the last couple of days I have given the chassis a few washes of a MIG dust wash and added a few oil stains from a substance made by MIG that I have had so long that it is like tar! A bit of white spirit thinned it to a useable consistency and it was applied to things such as the universal joints and sump plugs. The exhaust which looked pristine in its aluminum paint will in real life have been made in steel and therefore will have rust as the heat of the gases burns off the protective paint. I replicated this with some suitable weathering powders. I still need to blacken the end where the diesel exhust would leave a sooty deposit.

As i need to finish off the inside of the cab so I can assemble it to paint the outside I spent a few minutes painting various things on the dashboard to make it look like a photo I had. Disappointingly the kit does not have a decal for this but hopefully given the small size, its location inside the cab and the steering wheel hiding it, my jerky painting may not be noticed! Finally to give the impression of a glass dial face I added a few drops of Tamiya gloss varnish inside the dial rims. Hopefully this will add a little variety to an otherwise large expanse of matt black. I also painted the two jerry cans that fit to the back of the body. Whilst the carrying case is painted in Russian Green the jerry cans themselves are in a Vallejo Reflective Green to add just a bit of variety. They will need a bit of weathering as well - you don't see that many pristine jerry cans in the military - they are usually a bit battered as they weigh so much, just like those paving slabs I reset today! Oh well I will just have to pretend they are jerry cans to make the job a bit more interesting when I do the rest of them!

Silver lining?

 

Way back when I started this build of the Zvezda K5350 Mustang it started with the engine block and gearbox. I was going to paint these before they were installed in the chassis but as the build went on that wasn't a realistic possibility - I just would not be able to paint the chassis whilst not overpainting the engine/gearbox to some degree. Hence I am now at the stage with the chassis painted where I need to paint the engine block, gearbox and transfer box for the 6 wheel drive in a silver or in this case an aluminum colour. Given the basecoat is black on the components, the aluminum Vallejo paint covered well. I used a mix of the ready thinned Vallejo Air and the ordinary paint that gave a first coat that in effect 'floated' itself into most of the nooks and crannies. A slightly thicker second coat went on once that thin coat had dried out. After that had dried a little black paint was brushed onto areas where the aluminium paint had strayed and it almost looks as though I know what I am doing! The disappointing part is that much of that detailed engine will be covered for ever and amore once the cab is installed. The kit offers the option of the cab in normal position or with the cab tilted to make the engine viable. No doubt with some though a way to make the cab 'tiltable' could be found but I am happy enough just to have a truck with the cab in driving position. If the guys at Zvezda had meant it to tilt then that's how they would have made it so I am not going to try to do what they did not! Fitting the cab and body back on the chassis you can see how much of the engine and transmission is hidden. Once I get some weathering on that will tone everything down and hide some of my dodgy painting - every cloud has a silver lining!

6 Wheels on my wagon - or is that 7 if you include the spare?

For those of a certain age the title is a play on that old hit Three Wheels on my Wagon by the New Christy Minstrels - see it on YouTube here . However for the K5350 six wheels on the ground is what it has and having test fitted them I am glad to find all six do touch the ground so no twisted chassis! Phew! I could not resist putting the body and cab temporarily in place and standing one of the MiniArt Russian tank crew figures that are being assembled at the moment next to it. For 1/35 scale its a big model. It is really coming together. Hopefully soon to be finished but I need to finish re-setting some large and heavy slabs over the next few days just so Mrs Woody knows I am not enjoying myself too much!

Its never as finished as you think.

A busy day at WMD HQ with a major session of gardening and some model making slipped in just to ease the pain of the gardening. I feel as though its more like Autumn with the number of leaves down on the ground and if I hadn't of been working so hard and getting warm (hope Mrs Woody reads that part) I would have been exchanging the T shirt for a fleece!

Model wise the tyres for the Zvezda K 5350 Mustand truck were painted yesterday and the wheel rims were painted today. When painting small components I try to afix them to something so that they can be
airbrushed without getting finger prints on them.

In this case a spare piece of plywood with small lengths of masking tape attached so that the sticky side is facing up acted as the base. I keep the lengths of masking tape short as if you try to do one long length the air from the airbrush will get underneath ala Marilyn Monroe and the masking tape and whatever is attached to it will start flying about. A coat of black primer which will also act as the top coat was applied and the wheels along with a few other bits were left to dry before being given a coat of matt varnish.

I have tried many matt varnishes over the years, some successfully some not so leaving what is more like a sheen to the item sprayed. At the moment I am using a product from MIG called Lucky Matt Varnish and it is great. It is so matt you almost expect a black hole to appear when you apply it to something!

I saw it at a model railway exhibition if anyone remembers those. I almost didnt but it as it was about £7 but you do get a lot and it works. I will be using it again.

The K5350 chassis has aslos been primed. There are a couple of bits that I missed but given the complexities of all the nooks and crannies that is not surprising.

I primed the chassis because I thought I had finished the construction work on it. However as the title of the post suggests it wasn't! Looking through the sprues for a couple of parts yet to be fitted to the cab I noticed on Sprue G two parts left. I knew this sprue was mainly engine components so looked through the plans. After a short while the two parts were located on the plan and then attached to the model.

I think the above photo shows the two parts in question very well! It does make sense to check back on sprues and I never throw them away until the kit is fully complete just in case. If you are wondering, yes there is a sprue with the bell on the bridge of a model ship out there somewhere just not here!

On the T-85 tank the tracks are just about there!!!!! Yey! I will however delay any further celebrations until that model is finished as it is bound to throw up some more issues!