About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

T is for Truck Part 2; Kit Stuff

What those below will hopefully look like if I ever get round to finishing them! The Hasegawa tanker body with a Cooper Craft Taskers tanker-trailer. This is one of my more recent efforts...I finished it about 15 years ago, Hey, it's a fits-&-starts thing!

Weathering was thinned gloss chocolate and gloss black for the spillage and a quick dry-brush with pale sand. Taskers were still making trailers when I was a kid and my cousins had a few on the farm for hauling grain. I reasoned that trailers were cheap and easy to produce, and with the US shipping heavy gear like tanks over the Atlantic, they might have bought/sourced some stuff over here?

Not one but two unfinished projects (the Hasegawa's are one project the Heller is another!). The Heller/Airfix kit is really nice once you get it together, but it's not easy to produce, given it's a recent moulding with all the new technology available during the design/manufacturing process, it suffers (like the Jeep released at the same time) from very poor joining points, some of the stud & holes are barely visible, and while it's a while since I built it, I seem to remember the long 'shelf's' to run the glue down and rest the other/larger parts on were problematical.

The Hasegawa ones I'm building as differently as possible, so it's screen down and no tilt for one, full cover for the other, and one's going to be dark olive, the other olive drab.

Comparison shot of the Heller/Airfix truck and Hasegawa sandwiched between the two versions of the Airfix Polyhthene readymades. On a war-games table there's nothing in it, in a line there are differences but they are slight, although the Heller truck is a bit slimmer than the others. I lined up longest at the front, I should have put it at the back but I can't be arsed to re-do the photo!

The full range of the Airfix readymades, the two colour variations of the first version on the left with a carded example behind, on the right the three main colours and a boxed second version. For a guide to the two versions see Part 3 below.

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