cifenet

Great color, classic look and great finish! Thanks for sharing this!

Love the details and it came out fantastic! You basically made a great car out of nothing! Good job!

Awesome work! This isn't the easiest kit to build for sure! Looks like Revell never fixed their groove tires all these years though. At any rate, your FW23 is one great looking model!

This is one sweet work! Brilliant work, I may add! I love the quality finish and the photography is also excellent! Also great job applying decals to the bare metal, I can hardly see any transfer film edges!

It isn't common to see a silver Camero, but this one came out fantastic! Nice job completing it very well!

Beautiful job on both of the cars! But the green metallic jump out loud, very cool!

Continuing the work... Assembling the sleeper is done by building up sectional panels. This may seem straightforward, but I found it to be difficult because: 1. the instructions were vague in terms of where to attach each panel. 2. had fitting issues causing the back panel to sit slightly wider than front. I left some glue residue on the panels as I was fighting to squeeze the rear panel in. 3. the idea is to attach all of the panels and then fine tune as glue sets in. But this task was somewhat tricky. For one, as noted above, I wasn't sure if the floor piece needs to be attached on top or bottom of these guide tabs? I didn't think about this too much and assembled as shown above, but my decision ended up causing me one bad headache. I will cover this later. As usual, once the factory chrome is stripped, I have multiple options to detail the from bumper. I will definitely add additional driving lights and also replace the bolts with stainless parts. The middle openings can be cut open, but I wasn't sure how the frame details will be still revealed once mounted. Improved tank details. Using various aluminum rods and tubes, adding details can be easy. Smaller tubes can be cut with a hobby knife (by rolling a tube using a typical knife blade), but large ones need a mini cutter like the one pictured above. I think I picked this up at a local hardware store relatively cheap. I could easily use hex nuts to detail, but then again, using small aluminum tubes seem okay for the brake line details. I began detailing the frame and worked on small components that will need to be attached on and around the frame. Quickly performed a mock build by connecting differentials and drive shafts to the engine. I confirmed no surprises! Before laying out clear, I need to apply decals to the hood and cab. Again, the sleeper will come at the end. These decals are very good compared to AMT. I think these were made by Cartograf in Italy. They are usually very accurate and react well against my decals solutions (Micro sol/Micro set). I will be using the blue stripes for my silver truck. Excluding the sleeper, the hood, cab, and the door shown above must be lined up together when applying decals otherwise the livery lines will not be straight. I managed to screw up lining this one though. Luckily, this area will be behind an air intake and mostly likely be hidden! Applying clear to various body parts is a process that I still get nervous. It isn't the fear of making mistakes, but one mistake meant a possibility of performing unnecessary work to repeat things. The worst case would be to strip the paint to the bare plastic and repeat the whole thing! And in this case, everything went well except I made a mistake by touching this roof spoiler. Why did I touch it!? Why did I touch it!? BTW, I did block out my fingerprint from the picture, just trying to be safe against cybercrime. While taking these photos, I found the front wheels are sitting "in" too much. Maybe the fenders are sticking out too much? But I have no way to narrow the distance between the fenders. I need to find a way to insert wheel spacers to create a wider front track now... Probably 1/8th inch on each side or even 5/32nd inch! Thanks for following so far!

Sure, but “kit bashing” literally sounds crude, a “customization” sounds more professional! Thanks, Hakan!

More update on 359, I managed to put a couple of hours last night. I don't want to lose my motivation to finish building this truck so I will avoid taking a long break in between. I have a couple of kits which started years ago and never resumed just because I lost interest building them. This can't happen here, so it must continue! I suppose I could add extensive details to the engine, but I decided to go easy thinking I can get away with simple black wash. I will highlight some areas even though it may not be 100% accurate, but it should be still convincing enough. Other smaller parts were also addressed at the same time. I try to replace bar/shaft/tubing with the actual aluminum tubes whenever I see an opportunity. In this case, I replaced the driveshaft with various aluminum/brass parts. I often use a product from K&S (#3403) which has enough aluminum tubes to scratch build driveshafts, exhaust pipes, and other mechanical components including sway bars and such. I added various cable holders on the frame. These came from a craft store where they have materials for making beads. I began the painting process starting with the front hood and fenders. The initial paint job came out okay. Still looks darker, but the important thing is that there is no imperfection on the surface where I have to sand. Some metallic paints cannot be polish including this one. It will destroy the metal flakes (pearl) so it was important that my surface is as smooth as possible. The camera doesn't pick it if the angle isn't right, but it has slight bluish tone which I liked. On the other hand, I also painted chrome on the grille and the result wasn't too good. I discovered some rough edges and rough surface after the painting session. I don't want to redo the whole thing at this point, so I will find some less destructive way to address it later. While the paint was drying on the hood, additional activities were perform to dress up the engine. The transmission and turbo parts were painted. I will add minor wiring details later, but the engine is ready. This is more looking like Peterbilt 359. Similar to the build approach I took for International Transtar 4300 build, I will first paint and detail the hood/cab. The sleeper will come later. Just trying to make the work smaller and easier to manage. Divide and conquer! Thank you all for watching!

I suppose this is the game I can play with AMT truck kits in order to build the one I want. Since these trucks can be highly customized, I am thinking AMT could have released an individual engine kit, a separate wheel kit, a frame package, a cab, different types of fuel tanks, etc! Then the combination of building a truck can be limitless! I guess AMT does this already (you can purchase different engines and wheels), but I can see a company doing this at at the level of "full" customization as long as the demand is strong. Thank Jeff! I can't wait till you show us the school bus in "Under Glass" section!

Wow, this one is super sleek and very different! The wheels look good, wheel covers look awesome, and the massive front bump shows off the tough look! I like the choice of color as well. Superb!

The truck has all of the details and everything is well done! But talk about some bravery! I can't attempt something this like, but I see what you did here. It feels like still wet getting out of mud/dirty snow mixture. Alaskan theme works for being tough and dirtied up performing its duty!

All I can say is "Clean, no problem, everything looks good, well done!"

Great result, indeed! I can see all of the fine details that you took care of. I know older Fujimi auto kits aren't the best to work with especially when they add custom body trims to create another kit. I got punched a couple of times thinking Fujumi kits to be another Tamiya brand. Overall, looking at the finished product, I can witness the tremendous efforts and skills went into building this. Nice job!

Amazing details, almost like engineering project by itself! The truck is turning out to be massive!

the mock up looks good as if this was done at the factory! Good process so far, I can see things are moving forward!

This is some tricky work, but very rewarding. I bet this gives you a good sense of accomplishment. Extensive efforts going into the truck now. I guess the next step would be that you just need to make sure the air filter piping aligns to the engine intake and go from there.

Wow, this is wild! Nice job making this unique and cool!

This is as sweet as it can be! Nice job finishing this and I can see many detailed areas are properly addressed!

Nice recovery on the paint problem! This car looks great even today's standards.

This WIP feels very luxurious! Love the progress so far!

Wow, this one is gorgeous! You did an awesome job capturing the classic look and artistic feel to it. Nice job~

Regarding the tires included in the kit, the tread pattern isn't too bad compared to the real thing based on Michelin X brand written on the side. I think they just got the shape wrong. I can also name others kits with bad tires, but I won't do that here. ? Just in case I may change my mind about the current front wheels, I made a set for fronts. 5 hole this time. Why not, right? At the same time, I started assembling and painting the brake champers. Again, Scale Hardware brass rivets were used to enhance the look. Unfortunately, Scale Hardware is no longer in business. I made several air supply hoses which will be added to air tanks and brake lines. I picked these up to do various connection detailing. I was hoping they were hoses, but they weren't. Still flexible enough to shape and route places. I thought AMT frame was long (I compared against International Transtar 4300 and AMT frame is longer!), but Revell wins hands down. This could have been just bad luck, my leaf spring was broken off, possibly from the factory. Repairing wasn't a big deal, but I ended up spending roughly 30 minutes digging my trash can where I threw out empty plastic bags. I couldn't find the missing piece. The cross support beams didn't have openings to allow cabling/hoses to connect. I had to remove the back plate and drill multiple holes. Painting preparation process continued. Using sanding sponge like this one has advantages compared to using sanding stick or sand paper. They conform better to surfaces (including curved area) and they just work better at gently smoothing out surface. I usually use 3000 for polishing out prior to the second or third paint layers. Correcting the surface imperfection here. I try to go slow and the best part about the sanding sponge is that you can wash the paint dust off and reuse! This would be my first Cummins. I read the instructions and Revell's paint code is calling out the following color: For some reason, I thought it should have been more yellow. Maybe I am wrong about this. Since I did not have "Beige Silk Matt", I mixed yellow and desert tan with white in random ratio. Then I made the tan darker and lightly sprayed. I also gave another coat on fenders, hood and cab. Came out better this time, but repeating the prep again. My silver blue paint cannot be polished (it will damage the metallic flakes) so I need the base black to come out as smooth as possible. I am not 100% sure if this matches the color of Cummins for Peterbilt 359, but it won't matter too much once I gave some dark wash. Thanks for keeping this up with me!

Yeah, I am with you on this. I can't believe no one questioned it before making this kit into full blown production. Odd thing is, other details are very good and they must have spent some effort making the kit proper... Thanks again for your support so far! Extensive info here! I originally thought the color is the only difference between "red" wrecker and "blue" wrecker! It is as if AMT wants to fool you! Ok, I updated the pictogram above. I hope this information helps someone when deciding which 359 to build! I guess this explains why "blue" version is going at US$100+, where "red" one is around US$40! Having said that, you can probably mix and match AMT kits to produce that "blue" version and save some money! Thank you Bill!

Thanks Victor! I hope this can be useful and at the same time also fun! That first box seems rare. The AMT wrecker kit, I see often. The Scalemates lists out 359 kits, but it doesn't go into 1100 vs Unilite: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/matchbox-amt-pk-6110-peterbilt-wrecker--958515/timeline# Here is what I put together. If you or anyone finds my chart incorrect, I will fix. And I am sure there are more variants, but for the sake of conversation for now, here it is. 1100 cab = tall windows, after 1972 vehicle production years Unilite cab = short windows, prior to 1972 vehicleproduction years