Harry P.

You didn't mention it, but it might be a good idea to create the drill cradle in such a way that it could be clamped down onto your workbench somehow, like at the edge of the bench, say. If the base of the cradle had an extension or "ear" on it that you could take a C-clamp and clamp the thing tightly onto the workbench...

By working carefully, I was able to get a perfect fit between the roof and the door header piece...

Stanley Cup here we come. Again!

Big step... the roof is glued into place! There's no going back now... I won't paint the roof yet–the body will still get a lot of handling when I install the doors. I'll save painting the roof for last so the paint doesn't get scuffed or messed up.

Rear seat installed. Now you see it... ...and now you don't...

Are the "wood" side panels decals?

Here is the inside of the roof and my "fake" structure made of strips of cardstock. Now you can see why I wanted those inside radii to be smooth and clean... so that my fake top pieces can be glued to the surface and have smooth bends, to mimic the look of bent wood top supports. The unpainted edges are on purpose... that's where the glue will go when I glue this top to the framework on the body (seen in an earlier post).

Hmmm... there's an idea!

It's not the amount of ink, it's the size of the sheet. In order to fit the names of the parts in six-seven-eight or more languages, you'd need a larger instruction sheet. Bigger sheet... higher costs. Maybe not $$$, but certainly more cost. And every penny counts, right?

While my roof strips are drying, let's jump to another aspect of this project. I went with full wheel covers on my woody, because I like the look. I raided one of my Phantom II kits for the wheel covers, but the problem is that there are only four (the Phantom II kit doesn't have side mounts). I figured I could scratchbuild two more wheel covers. I was initially thinking I could use a ping pong ball and cut a circular piece out of it to form the basic wheel cover, but after "doing the math" it became apparent that a ping pong ball's diameter is too small. A circular disk cut out of it would be too convex to make a realistic wheel cover. If I had a lathe I could easily machine the covers out of aluminum... but I don't have a lathe. So now the question is... can I get away with full wheel covers on the road wheels and open, spoked wheels on the side mounts? Or is that weird? Ideas? Suggestions? I'm open to anything...

First step is to cut a bunch of strips of cardstock for the structure. I'll cut a few extras in case I mess up. Then they get painted "Latte" with acrylic craft paint. No need to paint both sides–you'll only see one! Then a coat of stain to match the color of the rest of the real wood on my woody... And off to the dehydrator. This is oil-based stain, so air drying would take forever. The dehydrator makes short work of it.

Speaking of the inside of the roof... here's a shot of the roof structure on a real RR woody. This isn't the only way to do the roof–seems like there are no two woodies exactly alike–but it's one way of doing it, and it's the way I'll be doing mine. But on my model this structure won't be "real," only simulated. This interior roof detail will be just about impossible to see once the model is on display, so no real reason to go nuts here. I'm not going to bother with bending wood to make the curved pieces, I'm just going to simulate the structure with strips of cardstock. It'll look close enough to real for me.

I'm not using it on the inside. You'd never even see it anyway, once the roof is installed, because the inside will be black. No way you'd ever be able to tell whether or not there was any texture up there.

I showed you the rear seat under construction before... here's the finished article.

To give the roof a canvas texture, I used some finely-woven cotton (leftover sail material from a wooden ship kit). Contact cement was applied to the roof and the cloth... ...and the cloth was carefully applied. With contact cement and the fairly fragile roof structure, you get one shot to get the cloth down smoothly. If I messed up, there would be no way to pull the cloth off the roof without destroying the roof itself. I got lucky. Special attention had to be given to the corners, as I didn't want the cloth bunching up and wrinkling there... I wanted smooth, clean corners... Finally, the excess cloth was trimmed off with a sharp X-acto.

I smoothed out and rounded the balsa strips on the inside with coarse sandpaper... and rounded the outside edges and corners using coarse sandpaper and sanding sticks... And finally, I used a high-tech modeling tool I have (my finger!) to apply Bondo on the inside of the roof to smooth everything out and bury the little corner reinforcement blocks. This is probably overkill, but I want a nice, smooth roof on the inside with smooth radii and curves all around. You'll see why later in the process...

After I glued the basswood roof panel into place, I carved some triangular-shaped strips of balsa and glued them to the inside joints between roof panel and side/front/rear rails, for reinforcement and to provide some "meat" for when I round over the corners of the roof from the outside. Like the old saying goes, you can never have too many clamps!

You're so far ahead of your time that you just lapped yourself!

The "Escher"... built in small quantities; never really caught on because people couldn't decide if they were coming or going.

It's easier and cheaper to print instructions with just numbers rather than calling out all the parts in English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, etc...

Here is that roof frame, as seen earlier, all glued up and dry. You can see that the roof rails bend in two directions... arced both vertically (arc cut into the wood to follow the curve of the roofline) and horizontally (bent by boiling in water for a minute or two and then clamping in place until dry to follow the taper of the roof back to front). The vertical arc was cut first, while the pieces were still flat, then they were bent to create the horizontal arc. Small corner blocks were added for reinforcement... Looking at this frame upside down, you can see how the flat basswood panel will be glued in place to create the roof. Notice that I went with both a curved and flat roof... the roofline is arced as it runs over the tops of the doors, but the top of the roof is flat. I think this flatness combined with the arced roofline will look pretty good. Just a little design touch I went with to be a little different...

Thanks, Jason. Yeah, I guess cardstock and carved wood is about as "old school" as it gets, but like you said, I use whatever materials or process that I think works best for a particular situation.

I use Firefox.

Everyone can also post websites, true or false. Ledwinka's links to the Gestapo has nothing to do with the topic at hand.