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Plastic models — miscellaneous land vehicles

See Doing the Samba — Revell 1/24^th scale Volkswagen Samba bus with Hasegawa and Masterbox people.

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See Duck à l’orange — Airfix 1/76^th (OO) scale DUKW with scratch built hang gliders.

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See Mentioned in dispatches — Italeri 1/9^th scale Triumph 3HW motorcycle of World War 2.

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See Engineering development then and now by guest contributor Jonathan H.

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See Metal (and plastic) Husky — not a kit, but when retouched with paint a remarkably realistic model.

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See Motocross in miniature: Building Joël Robert’s Suzuki motocross bike of 1970 in 1/12^th scale.

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See Mr Moto Cross — Revell 1/12^th scale Husqvarna motocross bike.

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See Plastic DUKW, Italeri 1/35^th scale General Motors DUKW.

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See Revell 1/12^th scale 250cc Yamaha MX bike.

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See Viva Protar, Protar 1/9^th scale Montesa Cota 247 trials bike.

Mars rover

I made this Mars rover in about 1982 out of a B-29 fuselage and parts from a 1/25^th scale Chieftain tank. The wheel struts are tubes from a 1/72^nd scale torpedo boat.

Mercedes bends

Her mind is Tiffany-twisted
She got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, she calls friends.

— From Hotel California by the Eagles, 1976

Here is my Revell 1/24^th scale Mercedes-Benz 540K Cabriolet. It is 8 inches (20 cm) long and 3 inches (8 cm) wide. The guys, who are from the Airfix 1/24^th scale De Havilland Mosquito (see Wooden wûnder for mine) are 3 inches tall. The fräulein is made of ‘white metal.’ She is a kit in the minimalist sense that one leg was separate and had to be glued in place.

There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself
This could be heaven or this could be Hell.

Tank girl

The resin 1/9^th scale ‘tank girl’, which I bought online, is an exquisitely moulded kit of 11 parts. At about 7.5 inches (19.5 cm) tall, she is six times the height of the Mercedes-Benz girl in the preceding section. The tank girl is correspondingly far easier to turn into a realistic model by painting.

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In her younger days they called her Delta Dawn
Prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on
Then a man of low degree stood by her side
And promised her he’d take her for his bride.

Incidentally, the name Delta Dawn (in the song) apparently derives from her town of Brownsville being in the Tennessee delta. (See under External links.)

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The kit is made of what modellers call ‘resin.’ It is nothing like the resin you might have used on your violin bow at school. It is a harder and more brittle plastic than polystyrene and it is consequently harder to work with. Fortunately, there is little cutting and gluing in this kit. Most of the work is painting.

It consists of these parts:

• Torso and head
• Right arm
• Left arm
• Right leg and crotch
• Left leg
• Right foot
• Left foot
• Helmet with goggles
• Canteen
• Pistol in holster
• Ammunition pouch

The tank helmet is a different colour, but it is also made of resin.

However, it is for experienced modellers only. There are some chunky moulding projections to be sawn and filed off before you start painting and gluing. It uses Superglue rather than polystyrene cement. The kit I bought did not come with any instructions, so you have to know about such things or find them out before you start. Superglue sticks to (real) skin like nothing else, apparently because that is what it was designed for initially, so it is definitely not a kit for youngsters.

There was a slight mis-moulding of one buttock, which I mostly eliminated by filing.

Fortunately, there are enough photos online that show historically correct colours such as those of the various layers of the tanker helmet and goggles. (However, she is hardly a historically correct tank driver…) Although I am a recent convert to acrylic paints, I have a far wider selection of enamels in these green and brown shades, so I used those.

In an outdoors photo shoot, she was blown over and fell a metre onto concrete, breaking her apart. No real damage. Superglue time… Incidentally, the Sten gun came with her motorcycle. See Mentioned in dispatches — Italeri 1/9^th scale Triumph 3HW motorcycle of World War 2.

Mixing scales

Dawn and her bike are 1/9^th scale while the DUKW and its associated personnel are 1/35^th scale. (See Plastic DUKW.)

External link

Tanya Tucker – Delta Dawn on YouTube