new kid on the block!

been looking at the pickups brad and theres one just like my brothers (an f1 ford 1954 i think) gotta be done i'd say!!!!he's looking for a sign for his door, it'd be ironic that the 1:1 car copies the model version now wouldnt it!!??

now i just love taking fotos of the track, its when you get to see the little hidden stories that you gloss over with the eye but the camera sees much closer, so heres a few more piccies...it also starts to inform how the story can develop into the bits that still need to be finished....who is the race organiser?..is it an official event or some kind of underground street race?...why are there no crash barriers?? where do all these incredibly expensive cars come from? and how do the neighbours take it?? maybe i should get out more!!!!

anyway heres some more pics and again thanks for the nice comments, its really great to recieve and helps my mum understand why i'm playing with toys at 40 years old!!

thanks guys!, mr p (or can i call you rally), obsession is the right word there, at least for me, but then i obsess always when i'm happy and learning.there is something very satisfying in creating spaces and objects (which is why i trained as an architect and now make steel furniture) but that goes to a whole new level when you can design total landscapes, communities, histories and personalities!, its like playing god i suppose.
these days i cant even drive the car without looking at the detailing at the side of the road, or how weeds grow out of rock faces. a trip to the park is made more interesting by being a source of new foliage for the track.
the problem is that there is just too much that can be modeled, what about a city...graffiti, homeless, or an old derelict industrial building broken into by boy racers, the list is endless. i suppose we model things for the same reason that artists paint landscapes or still lifes, it helps us understand the thing we are copying.
i was trying to explain the idea of 'mid-life crisis' to s friend the other day explaining how a colleague had gone out and bought a beautiful classic porsche . obviously we are all jealous, but my take on it seems to be (as i cant afford a real porsche) build a mock up of your own village, buy as many supercars as you want (for less than 30 euros each) and drive them around your village with friends!!! , and then park them infront of your modelled house! works for me!!!

ok pickup recovery trucks!...after deciding i couldn't afford the lovely first gear models on the internet, and while in the garden the other day, tidying up the mess, i found a few broken old toys from the kids, andf being obsessive!, i decided that i would try my hand at building a pickup truck out of a crappy old chinese plastic thing, an old plough and the left overs from making the bridge!

so heres some of the bits that i found

so i did ask my son and he replied, "is ofcourse cos you'll make it cooler" (the perfect thing to say, !!) and so happily diving into the workshop i dismounted everything and started priming in red (the only colour i had in the cupboard)i used my big spray gun and the bits had to be held down to stop them being blasted across the room. i left a bit of the green showing through just to see what would happen. then the underside was sprayed back and with a dirty black finger i edged some of the lines of the cab.
then with an assortment of 2 component glues, started dismantling the plough and gluing on washers and bits of stuff to make it lookk a bit more mechanical.
the bits of bridge were glued onto the top to try and make it look like one of those extending arms. the string was rwound around the barrels and a bit of scratched balsa used for the sides (to make it look like an adapted tipper).
then the detailing was done (lights etc) with acrylic and a few watery washes for grime especially around the back.
the wheels are aged by my son in the sandpit over the last year, i didnt touch them!
the hook is and electric cable fastener and a cable tie! i'll look for a proper small hook next time i'mm out buying nuts and bolts
some leftover balsa made some wooden blocks chucked in the back and some motor wire made the roll of rope that hes got in there too

the local mechanic is a bit of a drunk these days and doesnt have the money for the upkeep of the truck so its getting a bit wrecked, but it'll do for the naughty boy racer when he crashes on that difficult corner (waiting for the postman for boy racer to arrive)


hope you like it its a bit 'mad max' but hey!
see you soon sig

ok .....today i've been finishing the rocks near the picnic and viewing area, i got some glue in a silicone type tube which is far better than the contact adhesive i've been using up to now, it sticks to your fingers forever, and although the kids like daddies 'bogie fingers' my wife wasn't too keen!
so rocks glued, grout placed and painted (while grout still wet, it creates more interesting colours as the grout is black)
more browner p[aint where the mud is, and a very brown paint stipled on the floor areas for grit, then the mud sprinkled on.(by this point the left over polystyrene balls are covered and end up looking like stones or pebbles).all done in one longish process while the glue is still drying!

whats missing now is the grass (which i've mislaid)and needs everything to be dry for the pva and green touchups, which i need daylight for.
the fences were a pain in the neck but the spare tyres came in useful while they were gluing, is sticks from the flower arrangement i found weeks ago, i figured it could look like trunks, and its stronger than balsa, for the car crashes!,
weeds placed in the normal way and those plus the olive grove (which looks dead as a dodo)need some green vitamins, the layout looks like a desert a bit, and not catalunya! however i'm liking the farmlike appearance in contrast to the village and the uphill curves. hope you like it, although it still needs work you get the jist

sig

well thanks to mannimal for the inspiration for the fuel tank...i looked at the kit on the web and decided that it could be built with some old cans!.

as i run the village bar we have tons of cans and that was the starting point, .
i chose not tho use the normal coke can as it would be too recognisable, but i cut 2 bottoms off two coke cans and cold welded (glue) them onto a pink fish can, to make it look more like a tank. i had to drink the energy drink and so i've been buzzing all day, dont know how they drink that stuff!

anyway, then the cradle was cut mdf, with 4 ikea shelf support legs screwed in, the barrel tapes are cardboard, tank lids are heads of wood bolts and other bits laying around my work bench. the petrol exit is a rawl plug and a bit of fake leather laces, heres a pic before painting, play spot the piece....
anyone whos ever bought an ikea cupboard will recognise those legs.!
so then the fun started, i masked off the ends and painted it all black, thinking it'd be a good idea...wrong ...it looked like a shiny black coke can....so i put on a layer of grey that i had.....which reacted with the black underneath ofcourse!!
so keeping calm at the edge if disaster i started rubbing around where the oil may spill from the tank, or where the tanker drivers walk to fill it... so the black came through but started to look ok. then i scratched some drips in and left it for a while. found some 30 year old transfers in an old scaley box and decorated the tank a bit (if completely incorrect shell logo). by then the grey had raised at the edges giving a really good rusty steel look! bargain!!..so with a bit of brown rust paint applied, here we have it..probably wouldn't pass health and safety regs but we are in a cave in spain after all.

hope you like it , i'm having fun

sig

coooollll !, to impress your daughter is a big deal, i realise....my girl (4) is kind of impressed and likes playing with the figures, and also is a very steady careful driver, but i can't say she's' into it'.....my boy (6) is very 'into it' i gave him a tube of expander foam and some steel and wood so he could make his own cave diarama with road and lake for his thunderbirds...it looked good and is still pride of place in the bedroom...also he tells his friends "don't touch its a model .not a toy"(important lesson!!!!).since then i see hes started thinking laterally and designing stuff without autoimatically jumping into the toy shop(even more important lesson!), the other day he suggested i should do a log fire with some balsa and a bit of red sweet wrapper....well i was impresssed!

so you feel like an alien...i know what you mean..my wife has no interest at all apart from she sees it makes me happy. keep working on them, all 4 of us are goiing to the monster truck show in barcelona on saturday, i'll tell you how the girls get on!....will be interesting to see embers comments!....cue ember.....

speak soon sig

they are the same ! and i never knew it. .thanks for that lars

in the meantime i've been thinking about the film 'conair 'with nicholas cage!
wouldnt it be great to have a race around that b52 bone yard!, i'm looking for inspiration for track number 3, it needs to be flat as it'll be cut into the lid of this one, so i'm thinking desert...weeds and abandoned military aircraft.
i went to the model shop in barcelona today and it appears they dont do a b52 in 1:32...those things really were big, so might have to limit myself to fighters and helicopters, but plenty of excuse for rust and grime....right up my street!

so i found this link which i thought could be interesting as there are some amazing photos...its off thread...but it all ties in somewhere!

link=abandoned stuff

check out the russian migs and the red helicopter...great!

sig

of course clot cars are cool! as is rust and abandonment! (i've always had a thing about wrecks and ruins...don't know why )anyway the biggest model i can find is a flying fortress at 1:48 (20 inches x 26 inches)66cm x 50 cm in real money!, quite large enough i reckon even though in reality it should be bigger. so i'll go with the 1:48 planes i think, and i've been looking at possibilities, old air fields, and the patina on some of the wrecks there are in the world (the web is a wonderful thing...all the pics are from google)
even if planes are not your thing, theres lots to learn for a modeller about how materials age i think..anyway these are spectacular images in my opinion
check out the graffiti, oil leaks, the stainless steel or aluminium stays shiny, the missing panels etc

speak soon sig

thanks folks for the praise and help.....nice to feel i'm not going crazy in a vacuum here!
ok so i've been putting some time into the web here trying to get measurements of kits, availability and fuselage dimensions.
the 1:48 superfortress is actually quite small in the fuselage (from plans i calculated 6cm diametre) not enough for a tunnel.
the hercules has a fatter belly but i really can't imagine cutting the fuselage in half, its a really classic plane and it would look better just slumped into the ground rather than chopped up. (in my opinion)
i've been using hobbylinc for the model information ron, the others were good but no dimensionmodel kits
and masmojo, thanks a lot for the link, which gave me hope for a while but i managed to get to an actual pic of the kit and it really was a cheap plastic chinese thing, nothing like the advert.....i would prefer to scratch build something then i can concentrate on the detailing more.
so heres the plan at the mo.
in my shopping cart so far i've got a catalina (beautiful, elegant seaplane will look great half buried), an a10 warthog(i want the planes not to be all ww2 stuff and one of my favourites from when i was little)
a flying fortress (has to be done!)and a black widow (interesting shape for disembowelment)
i would really like a couple of migs too, but not many available at the mo, plus they can be fit in later when the big stuff is set and the track layout defined.
so now knowing the sizes of the wrecks i need to do sketches of their placement (with or without wings etc) and figure out a cool route for the car.
the fusesage tunnel is by no means out of the window, and i've persuaded myself it shouldnt be that difficult (the superfortress is quite straight forward) but that needsto be the next stage after the actual models are placed....by the way all the models are 1:48 i dont see any problem with then looking small, when modeling the church of the plaza here it had to be reduced considerably, and still looks believable.

i also need to invent a reason why these p[lanes are all sat around rotting and not in a museum (maybe a museum that went bust!) and futhermore why they allow rally drivers to do donuts around them!
ah! also i need a bit of old runway with weeds growing through the concrete and some form of steel shed would be great too yes. ramps?? the jury is out on that, cars do jumps too fast in my opinion, if slot cars automatically jumped in slow motion then we'd all be putting jumps on our tracks (think dukes of hazzard), we'll see

all opinions more than welcome.

cheers and i'm off to the monster trucks......yeah baby!

hi folks!...monster trucks rock....grave digger is mental, all the fun of the fair with crazy free style motorcross, burning crane jumpers and lots of broken trucks....and my 4 year old still managed to fall asleep, to the relaxing sound of 2000 hp unsilenced engines!!
ron, that guillows stuff is great ....makes me wants to know more...what are you supposed to do with the tissue and dope (what is dope?)very cool and big but i still think i'll start with plastic as i know how to work it...(aging paper skin sounds tricky)loving the balsa ribs though, i might well use the idea in some of my furniture.(looking for new ways of tying what i'm doing here into my professional life!, and need some new designs for the paris show in january)
Lars, regarding the story board, the drug runner idea is a good'en or maybe the arms trade (hence the cheap migs that were thrown in to sweeten a deal?
maybe the guys used an old airfield where there were already some rotten ww2 stuff for their shady deals and they used the jets etc. (giving the excuse to SERIOUSLY rot some of the planes and just 'weather' some of the newer ones??
so why the car racing?naughty break and entry by the local boy racers using the airfield as a fun track since don vito got sent to the slammer?

keep it coming, the more intricate the story the easier the decisions are to make!

speak soon sig