What's on my desk? Part 51.

Merry Christmas, happy yule, glorious non-denominational end-of-year celebrations!

 

First of all: here are my end-of-year opening hours:

-24 & 31 December: 10:00 - 16:00

-25 & 29 December and 1st January: closed

-Otherwise: normal hours (10:00 - 18:00)

 

Daimler time!

Progress on the little armoured car is going well. I've attached the fenders and made a start on the turret.

But first off, I had to add the steering linkages on the front suspension. Gecko supplies six linkage arms: 2 each for straight ahead, wheels turned left, and wheels turned right. These need to be added before you can close the driver's compartment, as they're mostly hidden and unreachable with the lower plate in place.

This is how it looks with the steering arm and wheel base in place:

With that done, the front plates and roof could be installed. Which presented a problem: the upper front plate features a large driver's hatch/visor that can be posed open. I'm planning on doing this, as it's one of the few openings that will allow a look into the interior. This is one of these things that needs a bit of foresight. If I fix it all, it will be impossible to paint properly. If I fix the plate and install the visor later, I can't reach under the roof to fix the visor properly. So I decided to leave everything loose.

Bit complicated, but here it is in photos. This is the front plate in place, with the visor laid next to its hole. Note that there's a big area of roof directly behind it, preventing me from installing the visor later (there's all kinds of fittings that I won't be able to reach under the roof).

So I left the whole thing loose:

This will require painting in stages, but the end result will be far better.

Next up were the big half-round fenders. There's PE brackets to add on the insides and (for the front ones) mud flaps on the edge. The mud flaps on the real thing are rubber and need to be distressed a bit. PE isn't very bendy, but I learned a basic metal-working trick on the internet: annealing. Heat the PE part with a lighter (hold it in something non-heat-conductive like a wood clothespin) until red-hot, then let it air-cool slowly. This softens the metal, making it easier to bend (stiffer metal on the other hand is easier to fold). I then used the back end of a paintbrush to roll some curves into the part.

You can see the result here:

Side note: the counterpart of annealing is tempering: after shaping the PE, heat it again, but this time, dunk it in water to rapidly cool it. This gives the metal its strength back. Tempering isn't always necessary, though.

The mud flaps stick out a bit beyond the underside of the vehicle, so from now on I need to put it on a paint bottle so they don't break off and take the fine PE brackets with them. The fenders were made of thin metal and deformed easily, so brackets were put between their edge and the hull, so any deformation wouldn't block the wheel. Gecko (of course) gives you PE to represent these:

There's all kinds of stuff mounted on and between the fenders: fire extinguishers, ammo and other boxes, pioneer tools, a spare wheel, the exhaust muffler,... I left these all off to facilitate painting.

Finally, I started on the turret. This starts with the turret ring. You need to mount seats around this on thin rods. These will attach to the turret floor so the floor rotates together with the turret. The supports are very thin, one of them was bent a little on the sprue and I broke it trying to straighten the thing, but in the end I was able to fix it. Just need to be careful handling this.

The big PE part on the back end of the turret is the base for the radio. I had to dry-fit the turret shell to divine its correct location, because the instructions are vague at best.

When everything is dry-fitted in place, the Daimler starts to look like an actual armoured car:

One thing I unfortunately noticed is one of the suspension units is a little short. Not all four wheels will touch the ground. I might try to hide this by making a small vignette, placing the vehicle on uneven ground.

That's all for now.

See you next week!