Down to the sea

I haven't mentioned yet that I live on the coast of Maine within a few hundred yards of the ocean. The harbor I live on is a working one and not (yet) absorbed by the tourist business and most of my neighbors are fishermen or in a fishing related business. Modeling waterfronts and all the activity there is something I've done quite a bit of and I'd like to spend some time showing the results of those efforts. Typical of what one might see here are the lobster boats like the one above. This fellow is about to gaf the pot bouy and bring it aboard by running his line (called warp) through the davit you see just in front of him. The model is a waterline (meaning flat on the bottom and meant to be modeled in water) resin Bluejacket piece and I have added some resin traps on the stern that are representative of the old round top wooden traps of years ago. The water is a product from Woodland Scenics that is clear and I have painted the base under prior to pouring the fake water product on. The wake of the boat was done with epoxy.


Another related business to fishing itself is boat building and repair. Above is a shot from a boat repair yard where they are loading a rebuilt deck winch on to a shrimp trawler. The vessel is high and dry on repair slip cribbing. The crane is an old steam powered Bucyrus Erie B-2. Here's a shot of the repair slip framing made from strips of pine and weathered with a thinned dark gray acrylic paint and some chalk powders. Behind is a new barn being built to house materials. The ship itself is a resin offering from a Dutch company called Artitec that produces wonderful vessels of many kinds with lots of photo etched details. There has to be a way to get boats to and from the water in the form of a launch site. Usually just a ramp leading down to the water. Breakwaters that elevate the grade above the water can be constructed of cut stone, concrete and/or wood pilings as in this photo.


In the late 1800's and well into the next century this coastline was filled with steam ferries that ran from town to town carrying materials and suppies, passengers and even locomotives. The coastline represented here is fairly typical of what I get to see here. In this next scene I've taken the liberty to have some local wildlife make a show. Moose and whitetail deer and osprey can be seen and there's a family taking a Sunday drive being treated to see a passenger ferry slide past in the deep water just off the rocks. This is another of the very nice Artitec vessels available. That's the Penobscot Bay in the background there.


Wherever there are fishermen, there are old fishermen. This small wharf is no exception.And we'll say goodbye for this session just as this lucky sailor is getting a welcome home from his wealthy girlfriend as her driver and limo awaits.

A slight departure

A departure for an evening from the vehicles to look at what goes into my miscellaneous files. Photographing models in a scale scene adds something to them that brings them to life. It validates them, rather than being on a stark or some out of scale surface even if there's a nifty background. So I've built a number of diorama bases that put the model in a variety of scenes to let the model have more of a story. Outfitting these dioramas with accessories has become a favorite modeling past time over the years. As I mentioned in my welcome, there's a plethora of accessory details available for HO model railroad enthusiasts. I also have been building what I can't find from scratch in a lot of instances using just about every material known to be found around the house.
I was introduced to some nice resin castings from a place called Rusty Stumps last year. What I acquired from them was mostly shelving, benches and piles of stuff in resin that I painted like the workbench above. It fit nicely in a scene with an old junked truck with tarps on it and piles of debris all around. And some of the pieces helped to dress up the interior of my garage workshop diorama. Most of these accessories don't particularly lend themselves to fine scale modeling but as background objects, help to make the scene more interesting and realistic. What would a junkyard be with only junked cars? Old oil drums, piles of pipe and wood and parts of cars carry the eye all around the scene. And sometimes actually are the focus of the scene. In the photo above of an abandoned truck repair center. there are some old tires and oil drums. Some of the car parts shown are made by rubbing heavy aluminum foil over the part of a car one would want to make like a front fender. I use a blunt toothpick. It's then a simple matter of cutting the excess to form the exact shape and paint.

Sometimes it's just a simple matter of weathering a few old boards and pipes to create details to add to a scene. Of course there's always an obligatory tire or two that need to be strategically placed. Tarps are also a quick and easy detail that I make out of a single ply of toilet paper (without embossed design). Cut the paper to the size desired, lay over the object and then use a solution of 50/50 wh. wood glue and water and let the paper wick up the solution until it lays comfortably in place. Let dry and paint. I actually use the dirty water I clean my brushes in sometimes for the 50/50 solution and the need for painting is eliminated as here in this old retired fire truck diorama. The dusting with a bit of light colored chalks finishes up the job.

Not always are details quick and easy however. In the scene below of a waterfront wharf, you will see a ladder, a water tower and an old tractor powering a pump. All but the tractor itself being scratch built. Here again I emphasize the need to pay attention to scale. Both the size of the wood and the distance between rungs were carefully measured to give the ladder a realistic look because even a great weathering job wouldn't help an out of scale piece here. The one easy detail here barely seen on the left is a heavy rope which is nothing more than a coiled Dacron fishing line.In the following mini desktop diorama, I scratch built the brick wall from plaster and added the details of the tire, oil drums and cardboard box. The box is super easy. Just cut and fold some brown wrapping paper just as you would find a real box cut out and folded. A dab of white wood glue and some trash inside and you have a suitable detail. The little cans you see are tiny resistors from an old radio.
Well I'm sure I'll be spending more time on this kind of stuff and am anxious to go into detail on some of the dioramas one by one as time allows. But for now, this is all the "detail" I am going to go into. Thanks again and have a great week!

A step into today

I drove a big rig for a very short time many years ago and loved it. But leaving the house early Monday mornings and returning late on Fridays just wasn't conducive to raising a family. So when I found out my wife was pregnant with our first, I joined the family construction business. That hasn't stopped me from having alove for the over the road tractor trailers. It was said to me some time ago, that I only build vintage vehicles and viewing much of what I have shown so far perhaps one might get that impression. But I have built many a modern truck in my modeling over the years and thought I'd like to show just a few like the Kenworth W900L above. This is a diecast truck from a Dutch firm called Edocar that has been stripped, repainted and had a few extras added.
The Mack Vision is their first entry into an aerodynamic body and I must say it is one of the more attractive of the type. This model is a flawless resin cab of the Vision presented by Masterbilt Models. It requires the purchase of the Herpa/Promotex Mack CH (which the Vision replaced on the Mack roster by the way) as a donor vehicle for the chassis. It is an easy fit and the glass from the CH fits nicely also. This particular truck has been outfitted with a high rise sleeper unit also from Masterbilt and Budd style wheels from Boley. The trailer is a Great Dane 40' van from whom I do not remember but it has spoke wheels from Lonestar. I painted this model with automotive lacquers. They give a beautiful finish but a word of caution to putting it on plastic models. Prime, the lacquer will most definitely alligator raw plastic.
Staying both with Mack and with Masterbilt Models, I'd like to show the other newer Mack that is used most often as a contractors truck and not particularly a highway tractor, that is the Granite. For this truck, I chose the Lonestar lumber body and added wheels and tires from another fabulous supplier of resin castings, Dennis Aust Models. The black banding on the wood stacks is merely wire dipped in Blacken-it, an etchant that turns just about any metal black without having to paint on a finish. The truck bed tie downs are a tape that is used by R/C model airplane folks that is put on and heated to make it tight.
Some time ago WalMart came out with a line of diecast trucks distributed through an outfit called Malibu. Although they were good to scale and the bodies looked quite accurate, there was always something about them that was in discrepancy with the real thing. In the case of the above truck and most of the others bearing the Malibu name, it was the grille. My guess is that to avoid licensing , they couldn't make an exact replica of the prototype. These trucks also came with a very thick paint job that in my opinion obscured a lot of detail. What I show is the Freightliner Columbia and the grille fix was an easy one. I also stripped the heavy paint from the model and did this one up in the colors of Sunbury Transportation out of Fredericton, N.B. We see a lot of these bright yellow trucks bearing the Sunbury logo here in New England. The great decals on this truck are from the now defunct PenBay Equipment company.
The last to show this session for modern vehicles is an very unusual truck that one might never see. It is the Kenworth C500B oilfield truck that has been used as a prime mover in the Saudi oil fields. They don't get a lot bigger or more powerful than this and you'll notice the large high floatation tires (super singles) all the way around this monster. The model itself is another offering from Dennis Aust models and has been placed on a 10 ton military chassis with winch from Roco Minitanks. All of the resin details on the model such as fuel tanks, air cleaners and spare tire holder are also from Dennis Aust. There are also photo etched mirrors and a roof rack details and to add even more, I put wire grabs and steps in appropriate places as on the real truck as well as fender mounted turn signals.
So there ya go. a few modern rigs from me and I hope to have the time and room to show the many more that come out of my little 1/87 garage from time to time.

From just one model

The 1/87 Vehicle Club s pretty much set the standards for this scale vehicle modeling and was actually the beginning of any attempt at organizing folks in the hobby. Since then it has grown to include modelers from every continent but Antarctica as far as I know. The galleries that are posted there by one of the hobby's "forefathers", Bob Johnson, show some of the most magnificent modeling in any scale. I have a habit of doing my research on the 1/1 prototype of any model I build and then going to the galleries to see what has been done by any others in scale. Several years ago I noticed an obscure little model of a 1930's Russian Zis-5 truck built by a Polish modeler by the name of Robert Gawel. A little research into the prototype shows that a group of American truck manufacturers went to Russia in 1927 and set up a plant there that began producing what most closely resembles the Autocar truck of the era. It remained unchanged in style and engineering all the way into WW2. Roco Minitanks (now distributed through Herpa) in cooperation with a Russian company called Komo made this truck available in 1/87 scale for several years. I found the injected molded castings to be not just prototypically accurate to scale but extremely crisp and highly detailed for a model of the era. So I bought a few, and quite a few since my first purchase. The truck lends itself to be finished nicely, right out of the box and has terrific potential for modifications. The first image you see above is right from the box and has only been painted and has what is referred to as a shop body on it. This next photo shows the only other configuration that the Roco piece is offered in, a utility flatbed with wood sides and a canvas top. I have however, chopped the wood sides down on the curb side of the truck and "rolled" the canvas up for a vegetable truck. This fellow seems quite annoyed at the boys drinking on the loading dock as he labors to unload his baskets of tomatoes.I've always had a fascination with tow trucks in spite of my aversion to the need for one in real life. This next Roco was a true test of my scratch building skills. The boom is made from styrene rods and I fabricated the winch from different styrene pieces and parts from an old wrist watch to make the hand crank.

I figured there was certainly a truck like this that was a solely dedicated highway tractor and found some very similar to the one below. I scratch built the trailer and used some soapstone rods as a granite load to come up with this rig. These soapstone pieces were by the way, used years ago in the glass business to write on the glass. If you ever come across a piece of soapstone, give it a try. The addition of the fifth wheel was all that was necessary to complete the truck itself. This next version is an example of my looking for something and finding something else other than what I wanted. I ran across a photo of an old telephone pole setting truck. An interesting feature on this truck is that the cable comes from the winch on the back, under the bed of the truck and emerges out of the center of the bed to go then up to the sheaves on the boom. Again, most of this bed and boom were scratch built and the winch was made from watch parts similar to the wrecker.










I actually have several other models of this truck but will present only one more since the hour is getting on. This was perhaps the quickest vehicle I have finished and truthfully is nothing more than the cab sitting on an empty chassis. But I would like to show a weathering technique here to close out this session on how many varities one can get out of a particular model. The rusting effect seen here is done by merely painting the model in critical areas with a clear flat finish. In this case an acrylic. Before the finish is allowed to dry, I sprinkle rust made by soaking a steel wool pad and letting it dry, then crushing it up, waving a magnet over to get the particles that have not been fully oxidized. This produces a very fine rust powder. After letting the flat finish dry, I simply blow off the excess rust to produced the look you see here. Well thank again for stopping by. I hope to improve this "experiment" I'm doing with this blog as I learn more.

What to model?

I don't have a layout and don't run trains. I'd like to some day but as my children have left the nest it seems my wife gets first dibs on their rooms. I will make a space eventually but until then I'm taking the opportunity to model anything and everything. Not having a layout at this time doesn't restrict me to any specific era so you will see pieces ranging from quite old to modern equipment. I do however have a penchant for the older classic trucks and cars. Structures on the other hand seem not to date themselves so much and can be used on a layout of just about any era.
My first step in modeling anything is to research as much as possible on the subject model. Finding the years it was produced, and as many photos as possible is something that can be terribly time consuming but I enjoy it. This is where the value of a good search engine comes into play. When typing in a subject, I go first to an image search. This usually leads me to articles that are appropriate to the subject. Often one can find a variety of configurations for one particular subject. I was searching for a 1920's Packard truck recently and found over a dozen different uses for the same vehicle. So it happens frequently that what I first began to look for eventually turns into something else completely. The 1922 Packard truck on this page was first to be a logging truck but turned into a beer & ale delivery wagon after finding some photos on the net.
I'm sure we all would like to model the old car or truck that you first owned. Mine was a '49 Hudson. Unfortunately all of the cars ever made just aren't available in the scale. I don't have the ability to build vehicles from scratch but have altered a few to resemble what I want. Ranked very high in my favorites list is the Model F Mack. Not the more modern cabover highway truck but the old chain drive FK & H models from the 30's. I was able to use about three different models to get to a point where this was a fairly distinctive Model FK Mack heavy tractor.
In the last few years I've seen an appreciation among RR modelers for correct to scale, accurate and unique models for their layouts. RR modeling has really seen some exquisite quality modeling go into structures and scenery recently and these folks want to put vehicles that have the same attention to detail and prototypical accuracy as they have put into the rest of their layout. In unofficial and rather random type polling, the Transition era seems to be the most popular. I believe this can be estimated from the late 1930's into about 1960 and represents the time ending the use of steam locomotives and the beginning of the diesel era. I suppose that much of it's popularity has to do with the fact that many (myself included) grew up in a part of this era. Nostalgia is a powerful incentive. The consequence of this popularity is the introduction of a lot of vehicles that span the era from a variety of manufacturers. One of my favorites is an outfit called Sylvan Scale models and his vehicle repertoire is primarily Transition era pieces. Here you see a resin kit from Sylvan that has had a cast metal flatbed put on it's chassis with a scratch built headboard.
If I haven't mentioned it yet, I built all of the structures you see in these photos and will eventually be having some discussion regarding them too.