Western Star 4900 FA plow truck

[Rockford]

The utter brilliance continues!

[BK9300]

19 hours ago, Rockford said:

The utter brilliance continues!

Thanks, Steve - much appreciated!

[Scott Eriksen]

On 8/23/2025 at 10:26 PM, BK9300 said:

Spent a frustrating afternoon trying to figure out how to line up the warning stripe decals on the back of the sander - go figure.  Seems like a small problem, but the closer I get to the end of this build, the more problems I find/create to slow myself down!  Didn't get the decals on, but thought I'd share some of my frustrations and my plan for tomorrow.

 

The stripes on the real truck meet at a 90 degree angle, so I started by trimming the ends of two decal test strips at 45 degree angles.  Haven't decaled anything in over 30 years, and even using Micro Set, found it difficult to move the stripes into position on a test piece of painted styrene, so they met neatly along the 45'd edges - also discovered that the decals won't take much abuse before coming apart! (the black pieces at the bottom were test patches for the non-slip strips on the sander fender)

 

After thinking about the difficulty of getting the 45'd ends to come together, I went back to pics of the real sander.  Again, the mechanics/body shop guys are much smarter than me - I made two 45 cuts for the stripes to come together while they made 'butt' connections using only one cut.  Much simpler!  Also, the join on the real truck is still not perfect - thin line of paint shows at the joint.  Might still have some difficulty moving decals around, but won't need to fuss as much as with the 45's -

 

So, after wasting a couple decal stripes (I had ordered extra just in case), I drew out a layout using the butt joint method and should be able to work out from a Tamiya tape center line and have it work out - hopefully!

 

Tomorrow will tell if this plan works out!

 

Brian,,I use a lot of stuff from Microscale for stripes,,etc Microscale Decals: Stripes

[BK9300]

4 hours ago, Scott Eriksen said:

Brian,,I use a lot of stuff from Microscale for stripes,,etc Microscale Decals: Stripes

I've got the site bookmarked and will check it out - thanks, Scott!

[BK9300]

Lots of prep work this morning, for a bunch of small items that I got painted this afternoon -

 

Got the first colour coat on the truck's visor - 

 

All the work light housings for the sander, and a few others around the plow, have been painted - all the brass pins will be trimmed shorter, come time to glue them in place.  The mounting brackets still need to be detail painted aluminum - will need to concentrate, and brace the paint hand, to not make a mess of that job!

 

The two lights for the upper flashers, and various work light lenses, painted amber -

 

These are fittings that cover the work light lenses - didn't think I was going to use them at first, but the fittings are intended to hold the lenses in place.  A couple 'dry run', test fittings showed me they will definitely make it easier to glue the lenses into the housings.

++

 

The yellow beacon lights from Auslowe have their first coat of amber - I think one more coat to darken a bit more should be enough.  Should still be able to see the reflectors inside with one more coat -

 

Should be able to finish the assembly of the remaining bits on the sander early this week!