cifenet

Fantastic restoration, always amazing to see how they come back to their glorious days! Nice job!

Awesome work, I appreciate your description on paint choices also! The finished work is just top notch regardless the issues you mentioned. And lastly, great photography!

This is a great accomplishment, I enjoyed the build process and also I really like the use of bright body color and matching wheel. Very stylish too. Good job, Jürgen!

What a beautiful tanker this is. It definitely had all the vintage look and feel as well. A great work overall, the entire build is clean and proper!

Thanks for sharing the story and the truck built. Very high quality work and accurate representation of the real thing. I really like the painting scheme with green and white. Nice!!

I am speechless… Not only the build itself is awesome, but the hinge assembly is top notch, the fit is as good as it can get.

I like the subtle weathering work throughout the build. Good work!

The quality of the 3D printed parts are looking excellent! I am certain this is going to be super special as you make further progress to build the truck! 👍

The truck has a good stance and the color choice is also nice here. Great progress so far. I think Alclad is spray only so you wont get a good result without an air brush system. The decals looked like they attached properly too! As people mentioned if softner is used, it is important to not touch when the fluid is doing its magic. You may be able to press (only press) using a clean cotton swap to help conform the surface while the decals are wet from the solution though.

Great detail work and modification effort here. Keep up the good work!

Small details never lost here. Amazingly cool to see how you are constructing components out of nothing. Bravo!

Great progress and it is coming out nicely. I really like the blue finish on the truck too.

Excellent information! Appreciate the effort and initiative. 👍

Nice update! The paint job is gorgeous.

Simply brilliant! Nothing more to say here! 👍

Great work, I enjoyed looking at all the customization work put into the truck! The yellow and black color combination is nicely done too. 👏

To be honest, I never thought of the rivet details to be super "important" on these trucks. I actually think they are way too pronounced and noticeable, almost making it look like it is out of scale... Believe or not, I intentionally sanded them down so I don't see them very clearly. In addition, I usually polish the surface also and those rivets are painful to polish around (I end up stripping paint on the rivets during the polishing process anyway). You can always go without them and I don't think it will make the truck anything less. However, if you really want to restore the rivets, I suppose those rivet decals can be useful. My thinking is, you want to make sure your surface is all taken care first. And this means you do want to get your primer applied and taken care the surface. Then clear can be used to improve adhesive of the rivet decals. What I do not know is, how much you can polish once the base coat and clearcoat is applied on top of the rivet decals...

Great interior details! I really like the tinted glass here, did you paint the clear part?

Beautiful execution, Brian! The box looks sweet. All these details parts are candy to my eyes. 😁

Jeff, I really appreciate your support and it has been one of the biggest motivating factors for me to complete this truck! 👍 Thanks Tommy, I wanted to mention that your knowledge and feedback have been both helpful and beneficial for this build! Thanks again! Thank you, Larry! Thanks for your positive comment on this, Doug!

Technical, sophisticated, and bolts glore! Looking very nice!

Great progress and build initiative so far! I think you should take out the word “mild” from your title, it is as custom as it can get! 😄

Realistic result! Great craftsmanship building this up!

Thank you guys for your feedback and interest so far! I have already post the final work in the "Glass" section (link at the end), but I wanted to properly end my update here. From this point, most of my work is going to be attaching things. And this update would be mostly about my experience on attaching things. Starting with the exhaust pipe, I used the photo-etched mounting parts and they were very difficult to mount. I had to make sure I position the exhaust correctly and do not slip (otherwise the adhesive will ruin the painted surface)! Because of the exhaust pipe being made out of aluminum, the adhesive I was using had to support the heavy weight also. I used the "2 min cure" epoxy shown here and I was holding the exhaust motionlessly onto the surface for at least one full minute. Once the epoxy started to cure, I was able to perform some micro adjustment to make them look proper. I mounted the bumper and made sure the hood operation is working as expected. This took some time fine tuning it, the hinges were adjusted multiple times so they go over the bumper with minimum clearance. Now that I decided to keep the air canister as is, I began mounting other parts to it. I added the rubber hose and connected to the super charger unit. Also started mounting the torpedo lights and air horns on the roof. Ensuring that I do not leave any glue residue on the roof, I used Tamiya's X-22 acrylic clear paint to stick these parts. While Kristal Klear is also effective, but it is rather thick and bulky. Tamiya's X-22 has sticky characteristic and most importantly dries super clear, I use them often where I need small parts to be glued. Now that I had most of the components built and painted, I concentrated on small objects that required metallic shine finish. It is also good idea to paint these at the same time to prevent any deviation on metallic shade. For the headache rack, as an exception, I want it to have some reflective shine, so I must prepare the surface to be more glossy black (it could be glossy white also). For this, some polishing work is required where I start polishing the surface using 6000 polishing cloth working all the way up till 10000. Once I am satisfied with the base surface, I gave thin layer of chrome silver paint using low airbrush pressure of 8-10 psi. The idea is to expose the base coat to provide the shine as the metallic paint is applied somewhat translucent. Once two exhaust pipes were mounted, everything just got much easier. I attached almost all the parts I needed to complete the truck build. The clear UV resin was used to add "clear oval glass look" on emblems. Lastly, I lost one blinker (again) and could not locate one. I gave up searching the part quickly this time without getting mad. I quickly built a pair using some aluminum tubes and clear resin painted in orange. I think they turned out to be decent. Thanks again for following this WIP so far and I hope I was able to contribute the forum with some interesting photos and techniques. If not, I am hoping at least it was somewhat entertaining. The final work is now posted under "Glass" section:

Thanks always, Jim! Germán, appreciate your positive comment!! Thanks, David! I have been looking at your yellow Mack build and you got something super special going! Landon, your support has been a great factor motivating me to accomplish! Thank you! I am still new to the truck world and there are so many great choices to tackle... I have been also looking at Kenworth kits as well, and I would definitely need your knowledge and feedback. Thank you, Brian! It was pleasure having you checking on me and also seeing your epic build updates throughout! Thanks Mark! Hope to see more progress on your beautiful KW Aerodyne!