Tom Geiger

Very cool project and you have a lot of fitting, putty and sanding in your future. A van looks square, but once you tear it apart, it's anything but square. When I did my shorty Dodge van pickup and attached the rear of the van to the cab, they were no where near meeting! I still need to do an extended length Dodge Maxivan to replicate a friends old van, but I keep putting it off just because of the issues you are facing! Here's a photo of a Ford news van that I took back in 2006.

Cool model. Good idea! A lot of the old Crown Vic ex cop units I see around here have a little antenna on the roof or trunk lid and all the glass blacked out. Wanna bees!

Nope, the 170 slant six was always blue. The 225 slant six was red. The slant sixes in trucks were yellow.

The money shot on my bench today. All three of these are very close to hitting the display case. My Dodge van camper is also at about this stage, all needing some very final details to call it done. I've never had this many cars being finished at the same time! There's usually months, if not years, between my completions! Left to right: Heller 28 Citroen Bordens Milk Truck - Fighting me all the way. Every time I touch it to fix something I've broke, I break something else. 34 Ford sedan - Pulled the windshield back out. Didn't like it. Will finish this one up tomorrow Miss Deal Funny Car - Headers absolutely stink! I swapped in another pair that I had to sand and reshape to fit. They're molded in red plastic that kept bleeding through. So I finally painted them with flat black, then flat white to get it done. As I was putting the second one on the car (fished through the chassis) I broke off the roll cage. Headers done at this point. Will reassemble roll cage tomorrow, do the minor touch up and roll it off the bench!

The box art is nice but varies from the kit a bit. While the body had straight edges near the door opening, the box art showed a rolled edge. I decided, in the absence of 1:1 photos, that the rolled edge looked better, so I added it to my body with Evergreen. . The little four banger built up reasonably well and is nicely detailed. It didn't have a distributor or coil so I added them. I made the distributor from Evergreen tube. The coil was from my '50 Ford pickup parts box. The real engine used red wire, so did I. I will tone it down with Dullcote. There wasn't room to fit in the tube they ran around the exhaust manifold in, so I didn't do it. Maybe I'll fit in some aluminum foil or something later on. Here's the chassis up on wheels, with the floor plan attached. Although the rear area will be limited in view, since the rear doors don't open, I still did the full wood graining of the floor. I just like doing it! The kit instructions wanted it painted wood brown, the only reference I had. I finished the body panels and added the decals. I was worried they'd just dissolve in the water, but they were quite easy to work with. The match between the front of the body and the cowl is poor and didn't come out well for me. The kit instructions said to paint the inside of the body panels flat black, but to highlight the wood structure. I thought that would be too dark to see inside (especially since you will only see in there from the drivers area), so I did my panels the same color as the exterior and I did paint the wood structure. I am trying to get the body assembled right now and it's a tedious process. I will be needing to touch up some paint as I already have some glue marks. I may finish that up today just to get it over with since I'm dreading it. I wasn't looking for a show vehicle anyway, I just wanted a nice shelf piece to sit next to my Danbury Divco Bordens truck. I also wanted to see how the kit went together and looked finished. int and here's what my bench looks like right now. Three (count 'em!) vehicles nearly off the bench at the same time. Actually, my Dodge van camper is about at the same point. I've never done this before! LOL And for those into trivia and details, the surface they are sitting on is the pink board that I've built models on since my kitchen table days. I would use it to protect the table, then each evening I'd put it with my work on it, up on top of the refrigerator to keep the kids safe. It went with me to the model room where my bench is a hollow core door wrapped in brown paper. I've used it on top of the bench to protect it since I cut into it and drill holes in it all the time. On top of that is a rather thick piece of glass, which is the lens from a Xerox machine. I got that from my father's hoard. So that's my Citroen to date. I am at the point of final assembly, and am breaking glue joints and little parts. And as I am fixing one thing, I seem to break another. You know how it goes. But when I get frustrated I walk away, so I should go back upstairs while I'm feeling good about it! I should be posting more soon!

I don't believe I've posted anything about this build on this forum. I know I did on the Spotlight board. As I'm into light commercial, I really like this old Citroen line of trucks offered by Heller. There are several in the series. There is a Citroen Normandee woody pickup (the other kit I won that week) as well as a Waterman (French fountain pen company) van and a hotel shuttle bus. I did manage to find a bunch of research photos on the Internet, including a few varieties of the bus. I didn't find any of a real Bordens van. I used to see them cheap at shows and managed to collect them all, but that dried up years ago. When I see them going cheap on eBay, I'll bid but usually lose. Imagine my surprise when I won two for around $20 each in the same week. I did want to have one for parts for when I build the others, as well as wanting a set of those wheels and tires for another build. The above Bordens truck was the first to come in the mail, and since it got a USPS hole in the box (yea, straight through one of those tough Priority Mail boxes too), I decided to just build it. These trucks don't have a ton of parts but are nicely detailed. They have a very vague construction, and there are a lot of tiny fragile parts. Think about the assembly of early Revell kits. Heller also has the chassis building up inside the finished fender unit, instead of separate, which was a challenge. See above photo. I know how to build that better the next time. Also they expect you to build up the body from separate panels once they are finished and painted. Not easy at all. I'm struggling with this step right now. Another idea that looks good in theory but doesn't work in real life. These parts are held together by a flexible but very thin bit of plastic. Even while attacking the large ejector pins on the inside of these panels, they will split apart. I wound up gluing them together, using a bit of metal rod on the matching seam on the inside. Like I said above, there were a ton of photos of vehicles on the Internet. These are like the Model T of French cars and seem to be widely popular. The same vehicles were light commercial trucks and both open and closed sedans. I did notice that there is an open touring car as part of the Heller series. Guess I'll be needing to get that one! This engine shot is worth a thousand words. There are a few differences between this and the engine supplied in the kit. The kit engine has the top hose closer to the front of the engine, and the kit engine only has two blades on the fan. I never saw that before. I used it since it's cool. The next post will be my actual build to date. Hope you enjoyed the background on the kit.

I love the work you've done to get the window trim right. Good attention to detail. The drooped position on the drivers door would also be accurate. The lower hinge did wear on those and I had one Valiant that the sheet metal was rippled in the front lower corner from hitting the bottom of the door jamb. Also note that the door and fender gaps will fill in with paint as you said. I wouldn't go too crazy with them since they varied widely on 1:1 cars. That was not a good era for fit and finish!

I appreciate you are going over the process, including the trial and error and the do overs. You are very patient in redoing assemblies until you are happy with them and it's important that people see this. It lets them know the work that has gone into this master piece, but also makes it more believable and encouraging to see that even you don't get everything right every time! I have been watching this thread with utter amazement. In fact, I forwarded the link to my entire club!

Interesting. Back in the old days, dealers had racks full of brochures and they didn't care if you loaded up. Even when I was 11 years old, I'd walk to the local Chevy dealer and take what I wanted, no questions asked. Later on, as I was a brochure collector, I hit dealers in the 1980s and found that while some of them still had racks, many kept brochures under cover and only handed them out when warranted. I think the change was that the dealers originally got brochures for free, but later on the manufacturers started charging them. It's interesting that Chrysler is doing extensive brochures. I figured that we'd see less and less paper since everyone does their research on the Internet now.

Another good option for attaching glass... someone on a board mentioned this and it has worked well for me... From Michaels, Recollections brand Double sided tape. It's clear and strong. It comes in several widths. I'm looking at the 1/8" wide right now. On the back it says "Distributed by Michaels Stores" so it might be their own brand. I've attached the last few windshields with it.

Absolutely love it! Can a 4 door sedan be far behind? Jeff, what year is your 1:1 stawag? Pictures?

Very nice work, love the garage! Only because you are in Europe, I will mention that the '55 Chevy Nomad is a very rare and desirable car here in the US and wouldn't last long sitting there like that! It wouldn't go to waste!

The Staples stores that have print shops can do something similar. When my father in law died, we got several old family photos blown up and put on foam board to display at the wake. Turn around was same day / overnight and cost was reasonable.

I haven't used model glue in years. I pretty much use Zap-a-Gap for everything except the Microscale stuff for windows and lenses. I'll also use clear paint to put photo etch onto paint jobs

Nice work. Especially what you did with the bed and the missing wood.

Cool. One of my first jobs was working as a draftsman for a big engineering company, drawing piping for petrochemical plants and refineries. The big dream of the drafters there was to get promoted to the model shop. Back in the early 80s, they would build actual scale models and use them to route piping and controls. The drafters would then manually draw the isometric plans of piping by referencing these. Of course all this is done on CAD today! And once the 3D model is done in CAD, the system automatically generates the iso views and most of the drawings!

Per Richard's post, I see all hobbies as an aging thing. The guys who collect stamps and coins are complaining that kids aren't getting into their hobbies either. As kids we were model builders and avidly collected stamps, coins and other things. Today's kids have less free leisure time due to more organized sports and activities and they are also very digital, preferring modern media and video games. There are still kids that like to work with their hands. Both of my daughters, now in their 20s, always did crafts and still will make gifts and personalized items to this day. I think a lot of kids not building, is that they just aren't aware of models. When we were kids, model kits were sold everywhere... toy stores, grocery stores, hardware stores and the corner drug store. Today, they pretty much just are sold in hobby shops, so we've lost that exposure and the impulse sales. I would always go grocery shopping with my mother because model kits were lined up across the top of the low freezer cases. I'd usually be successful in begging enough to get one. When my club has done events with youth groups, the kids are enthusiastic and express surprise that models exist. Revell has been working on that with their great "Make It, Take It" program and now their new contest series. I wish them luck and hope they succeed in creating a new generation of model builders. As far as the hobby suffering due to the economy, that may be true to some extent, but at the same time at NNL East our numbers have actually been up. In questioning folks, it seems that they are sacrificing big ticket items like expensive vacations and new cars, and are spending more time close to home. So they are actually spending more time and money on hobbies like model building.

Thanks Ron! I do love the work you are doing on it, the rusty old survivor look is so me! Can't wait to see it finished, I will be following along. I do have a VW drag car that I started eons ago. I walked away from it when I ran into build issues that were beyond my skills at the time, but shouldn't be an issue today.

And Neil never said he was going to build an exact replica. From what I see, he took some elements from the concept car and made it his own. If he likes the car, then it's a success!

and to add to the festivities, here's the NNL East albums for the past 12 years: http://public.fotki.com/tssmcc/ or to learn of the next show, go to the website: http://www.nnleast.com

Your Olds looks great. Interior work is right on! Rich approved and he used to be the King of Flock back in the old days! Funny to see the Duplicolor Cordova brown metallic paint. I had a can from the $1 paint sale at Ollies a while back, and needed a dark brown for the fenders of my '28 Citroen panel. I sprayed it and WOW! What a great color. I made a note that I needed to do a whole car with it. And man, it looks great on your Olds! Here's the Cordovan brown on my panel. It's just the fenders, the body is cream colored.

The old IMC kit is pretty cool. It was reissued in the 1980s by a Japanese company called Union. Nobody knows what happened to the tool after Union went out of business. I only have one of the IMC kit, but was successful in finding a couple of the Union kit over the years. Typical Japanese flat box. The kit itself is cool in the fact that there are enough parts in the box so that you can build a stock VW and still have enough parts to build the entire drag chassis separate!

Ah, another straight pin builder. I pin nearly everything. Others will use wire or even plastic rod, but you can't beat the strength of the straight pin! Neat build, I'll be a watchin'!

I use a lot of Zap-a-gap as my regular model glue. It is expensive in hobby shops. I found out that Michaels stocks it, and it's a few dollars cheaper. Then I used the 50% off coupon and it was about $3. and for fuel filters, I bought a pack of Radio Shack diodes about 20 years ago... still have some. About $5 for a life time supply!