Fat Brian

Thank you, after spending so much time stripping it I kind of lost my mojo on it so it was a bit of a struggle to finish it. I started three other projects while this was soaking so my attention got spread out a bit.

Thanks guys, here are a few more pictures. I couldn't get them to load last night.

This was a fun build inspired by the L9000 driven the the "King of Obsolete" on Ice Road Truckers a few seasons back. It had kind of had a Mad Max or zombie apocalypse feel but a bit more grounded, kind of a what kind of truck would you want at the edge of civilization build. I started with two Coke delivery trucks that have been languishing in a box for about twenty years. I bought a resin L hood off eBay and added the sleeper from the GMC General. The rear suspension is from a California Hauler kit and the wheels and engine are from the 4070A. The fifth wheel, mud guards, and mirrors are from the Revell snap 359, the round tanks are from the R685, and the squares are from the Titan 90.

I'm moving this one to Under Glass, it's as done as it's going to get for the foreseeable future.

Sets of big and little tires and wheels, good carbs.

You can get a pack of various sizes of googly eyes at craft stores and cut lenses out of the curved clear plastic.

I had both of these kits in my early modeling career but neither one got finished, I still have the engines and wheels from both though. The red car has a great supercharged 427 and big and little Halibrands. I'd love to see them back out.

Thanks for looking at that, I just needed to know if it was even workable or not.

I understand, it's just such a common swap I thought someone might post their experience in doing it.

Once I got my nice paint it was time to dirty it up a bit. I got a little carried away with the salt on the frame so I had to do a similar job on the body. This one is getting close to being done, I just need to get the glass in the cab and the cab glued down so I can finish the exhaust piping. Then I will build the front bumper and rear tire chains and call it good.

I'd like to have them, those rear fenders would look great on a modern semi puller.

Huh, I've owned a couple of squares and a square Suburban and I've never seen a split driveshaft, I stand corrected.

They did not use an idler bearing/ two piece driveshaft. The way Chevy and Ford make a long bed truck is different, Ford adds the whole extra foit and a half in front of the rear wheels where Chevy splits the kength and adds a foot in front of the rear wheels and six incgrs behind them.

Bare metal foil is one of the few things I do really well but it's still nice to have another tool in the arsenal and achieve a different effect. In this case I used the pen for weathered trim that has gotten that whitish dullness to it and it looks perfect.

And I'm a guilty of it as anyone but we seem to be reaching a tipping point where our cheapness is going to bite us in our collective hind quarters.

I agree, I wasn't speaking about Moebius specifically. I just wish American kit manufacturers would go to more of the Japanese pricing structure where a new kit costs a bit more but reissues are cheaper.

I used the silver Sharpie for the first time yesterday and man, what an easy way to make a big difference in a build. It's not super shiny and doesn't do as good over large areas but the effort to impact ratio is very high.

I have to agree with you, if car modelers were more willing to pay a bit more for new releases we might get more of them like the armor and sci-fi guys. And that might help the price of reissues come down a bit.

I try not to use auctions but sometimes it's unavoidable and yes, now that eBay doesn't show the ID of the current high bidder or winner schill bidding is harder to track.

Yep, I learned after my first auction trying to stay the highest bidder for days only ends up costing you more money. Now I only bid in the last 10 seconds of an auction and if I get I get it and if not there will be another one on there eventually. They ran the price up on a decent but not great built kit that should normally go for $70 or $80 to $127 then an open but largely untouched kit got post and they've run it up from $10 to $41 on the first day. It would be funny if I wasn't trying to snipe the kit myself, and now somebodies holding the bag paying almost double on a built one.

About a third of my kits are in some for if partial construction but I find l finish more builds when I limit my number of active builds to two or three. I'm less likely to go off on some tangent and get distracted that way.

Some eBay amateurs just ran the price up on a decent builder kit l wanted higher than what an unbuilt on goes for tonight. The only bid that matters is the last on folks, fighting to stay the highest bidder four days before the auction ends only makes you spend more in the end. Now I've got to wait for another one to show up and hope the same thing doesn't happen to it.

The LN is the stock short hood version that comes in the kit, my L has a longer hood by about a foot. Notice how in my pics the front fender in all on the hood but in Brian's pics the rear portion of the fender mounts to the cab.

You had said in the spoon test thread that the soft spoons weren't the best ones to use, that was the point I was trying to make.

This is a situation where you hear about people doing the "spoon test", using their paints on a plastic spoon before trying them on the actual model. The test is two-fold, one to see if the paint attacks the plastic and two to see if the paints play well together. The first one isn't as much of a concern when using hobby paints but is very important when using hotter auto quality products. If you decide to go that route the general concensus is to use decent spoons, not the super cheap soft ones as the better ones are more analogous to model plastic. You can also use kit parts you don't plan to use in your build for testing. The tonneau cover in that Ford kit would be ideal to test on if you don't plan to use it. It's even big enough you could get some painting practice in with the actual materials you're going to use.