Rockford

Looks great, you'd never imagine that's scratch built!

Now my trailer fix is quelled for the time being (I've just bought two more, what's wrong with me!?), I turned my attention back to the W900. Just did some necessary things that don't really stand out but make me feel better. I added the brace from the firewall to the radiator and the hood supports on the firewall. To simulate the main loom into the cab I bound about 20 lengths of cotton together so it looks suitably messy. Added heater hoses and hoses to the water filter. I tried making mirror arms from aluminium wire but they were a mess so I'm going to resort to using the mirror arms off the Snaptite T600.

Nice clean looking rig. I do like the Fords of this era, including the cabovers, very much underappreciated.

Here is the Monogram Fruehauf Reefer from my 'Two Reefer Trailers' WIP where I finally worked out where the ride height problem lay. Another plain white box. I can't bring myself to livery them up, I love the stark white sides and anonymous look. I'm thinking of something though. This unit doesn't require as much fettling as the AMT Trailmobile but a few things did help. I made the landing gear operative, altered the reefer from the 'aero' version to the old metal casing Thermo King NWD30 sort of thing and printed relevant decals, added airlines too.

Just looks fantastic! All your hard work has been rewarded. I especially like the different metal finishes you have, as things would be in real life. This is really a kit to be proud of. I wish I had the money, the room, the skills, patience and the time to do something like this myself. Other than lacking those things I've got it sorted! Next question is... any trailers on the horizon? PS: where did the Titan90 come from?

Thanks for all your kind comments gents. As I've said before, I love the plain white or silver van trailer, such a staple of the American trucking industry. This kit is on eBay quite frequently. It's cheapest from the model railway suppliers who sell the version that came with the Volvo N10 tractor. They sell it as a piggyback unit. I'd like one of those kits but the shipping and customs charges to the UK just price it out of reach. I wouldn't advise anyone to venture into 1/32 if you don't have to though, stick with 1/25, you're in a much better place with that scale. It does seem that the golden age of trucking coincided with the golden age of truck modelling. The majority of what you see on websites such as this are kits manufactured or engineered in the late 70s or early 80s. That's my era, I left school in 1980 and went to work for a fleet of 200 trucks in Liverpool, UK. I just don't get as excited by the modern stuff, as superior as it is, it just doesn't have that brutal beauty of the older stuff.

Good start. Nice Cummins. Looking forward to your updates. This is one of the few 1/25 kits I hope to build. It was my first 1/25 kit about 45 years ago. Didn't know what I was doing.

Great looking fleet truck. I like the cut-off front bumper. So many fleets did that. I believe they thought it helped fuel mileage.

Very nice and very different!

Very sharp build. Like the trailer too.

Finally finished something, one of my two reefers I started last year. This is the AMT Snap-Fit reefer trailer. It's typical AMT fayre in that it's awful in many ways but the subject matter makes it still worth the effort. The sides of the box are fantastic, all the rivets and beading is so well cast, mesmerising! The rub-on decals are a new thing to me. I only used the licence plate. Altered the spacing of the rear axles to sort the underscale issue with the tyres, also narrowed the track. Made mudflaps from electrical tape. Dropped the ride height. Added working landing legs. Added marker lights all around. Did someone plumbing on the rear tandems and the reefer including the repeater lights for the driver's mirror. Added some decals I drew up on the laptop.

I've actually finished something! Got the Trailmobile finished. Decals on the reefer, little bit of pipework etc... I'm really happy with it. I'll post it in Under Glass

What a trip this has been! You're a great sharer! The finished product is going to be impressive. I particularly like your photography of the truck itself, makes it look very realistic.

I have to laugh when you say "I'll do a better job next time", look at the thing, it's brilliant! I couldn't hope to do something of that quality!

Steve Weathering would just be another chance to ruin my work, in my eyes. Just painting my models terrifies me until I get good results and then I'm elated. Weathering would be great, if I could trust myself to do it acceptably, so factory fresh they will have to be. I am thinking of lettering one of these though. You'll notice that the decals I put on the dark blue reefer have all gone. That's because I masked it when I decided to paint the grille instead of foiling it, and it took them all off. I accepted that philosophically, but that's about at the limit of my rework tolerance.

Apologies for being AWOL but my poor old mother in law finally succumbed to that dreaded Alzheimer's. It was rather traumatic because it turned her swallow reflex off. Four days of fighting for her life before it overtook her. So, the last week has been awful but my dear wife let me have some time on my workbench today for a bit of therapy. I did some detailing on the reefer, painted the rims silver on the Fruehauf, coloured my marker lights, built up the bogies, painted the battery boxes for the reefer batteries in a matching colour to the reefer and fettled the landing gear to operate. Looking good but not quite finished yet...

Wow, wow, and double wow!

Thanks mate, this is simple stuff in comparison to your jobs but I've spent four days and acres of masking tape doing these two. They're worth it though.

Well I couldn't avoid it any longer. I had to tackle the top and bottom rails. I was that nervous about the job I considered brushing them but I knew that would be patchy and with my trembling hands nowadays, a straight edge would be impossible. So, masked up both trailers this morning. It's a job trying to mask the whole job except for two little strips around the edge. The nature of the subject means that the very joint you're trying to mask is a row of hundreds of rivets so the tape has little room to grip. I laid it slightly over the line so that when I ran a cocktail stick along the river line it pulled back to where it needed to be. Did the same as on the Bison and sprayed a coat of the white first to seal the joints, then two coats of silver... I was either going to come away laughing or crying. Fortunately it was the former! As peeled off the tape the lines were sharp, straight and crisp. Just one or two places where there's a little bleed through, but only a slight shadow. The only real thing is that I seem to have missed masking a triangle on the front bulkhead of the Trailmobile but that will polish out.

Continued with the paint in the two reefers. Perfect conditions for painting, 34% humidity at 24°C, won't be many days like this. I was keen to use a different colour on the running gear etc... but after looking at hundreds of old photos of the era 98% of the trailers were a gull grey shade, only high end custom jobs were painted anything else. My truck are workhorses so that's grey it needs to be. Sprayed my reefer grills silver, the AMT kit version is on the right, my hand built one on the left. Then the van sides were sprayed white. All turned out very well. Tomorrow, the silver on the top and bottom rails. Just don't want any bleed through.

Scary day today. Reached the paint stage and I hate the paint process, there's so many ways things can go wrong and ruin the kit, prep, masking, the weather... Shot the primer over the lot. Then gave the reefer units a couple coats of light blue and the fuel tanks silver. They look good. One terror overcome. Next is chassis colour(s). Fairly straightforward, easy masking. Big dilemma is the white sides and the ali top and bottom rails. I don't know which to do first because of the masking. Ali rails then white or vice versa? I'll ponder it over breakfast in the morning.

Turned my attention back to my two trailers. When I painted the Bison I had some blue that was close to a Thermo King colour so I used that. Foiled and washed the grille. Not perfect but acceptable. Detailed the control panel and dials. Drew up some grill slots and cabinet door shuts on clear decal paper. Also reduced some TK logos and printed them. I didn't have any white decal paper so I just painted a white square on the clear sheet and overlaid my logos on it. Works fine. Door shuts could be thinner but they look ok.

Absolutely brilliant stuff.

I'm truly flabbergasted at the workmanship in this job. It's brilliant. If we hadn't seen it come together in the WIP you'd never guess it was hand built.

The 10th wooden buck was an interesting point. You begin to see how there were so many discrepancies in the finished kits. All before computers. Pencils and slide rules.