Many thanks to Dave and Martyn for those kind words!
The Spitfires are virtually done now with only the aerial wires to add on (although Skipper's might require a hole in the wing where a ground crew will be standing
)!
Here's another 'Start to Finish' instalment with the Austin K2 Ambulance (and thank's for not picking up my silly mistake last week -
Morris my foot!
)
The
Austin K2 Ambulance comes as one half of the old
Airfix RAF Emergency Set. This was another one of my Ebay wins and like the Bofors, it appears to be an early edition. Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end! It didn’t mention it in the auction description but this kit was not exactly as ‘pristine’ as I was expecting. For one thing the previous owner had actually begun to make the kit up, not very far I’ll grant you but some parts were already off the sprue and others, as I’ll explain shortly had old style polystyrene glue dried on. (It was fortunate that I wasn’t including the Fire Tender – the upper half of the water tank was very conspicuous by its total absence!) As, it turned out, so were the instructions (although I think there
was a mention of that in the description, which is why it was cheaper than many other examples of this kit on there!)
Fortunately, there are various ways around that (which I checked before I bid on the kit!) and one of the best was
www.vintage-airfix.com/instructions a site with many original instruction sheets available to download for free, not every Airfix kit by any means but many of them and well worth checking out if you’ve got an old Airfix without the instructions.
Photo 1 is my home printed copy of the Emergency Set sheet, as you can see, a fairly good quality copy although as you’ll read later, one indistinct part threw me a little towards the end of the build!
Photo 2 shows the first two parts going together, A1 and A3. The floor of the bodywork was covered in a fairly thick layer of dried glue which convinced me in the end to model the ambulance with the back doors closed. I would have loved to stick a load of details in there and have the doors open but since the vehicle is going to be just parked up near the Dispersal Hut, having it ‘closed up’ would mean a lot less repair work on the interior so that’s the way it went.
One of the trickiest parts is gluing the front mudguard section to the floor (which might be why the original owner gave up their attempt, if they were really young at the time I can fully understand why!) There is no actual locating peg or even a line to follow, you just have to apply the glue and hold the two parts together keeping them level by eye until the glue is set. In
Photo 3 we have the now dry floor with the basic one piece frame of the chassis. This needed some careful de-flashing on some of the mould lines before it was glued to the underside of the floor. There was a very slight warping on this frame, probably just down to the age of the kit, but a couple of ratchet clamps ensured that everything was kept straight as seen in
Photo 4. This kit really goes together quite rapidly once you get started and in
Photo 5 the addition of the two side panels and the cab rear bulkhead begins to give the vehicle it’s characteristic boxey shape. One thing to note here though, this part of the construction is given in section 2 of the instructions. On the bulkhead you’ll notice a peg sticking out which is supposed to take the spare wheel which protrudes out the side into that curved extension. The spare wheel isn’t added until section 4, by which time you’ll discover that the wheel won’t fit into the curved bit as the peg is too long to get the wheel onto! I simply cut the peg down by half when the time came!
Photo 6 illustrates a test fit of the cab front bulkhead onto which the bonnet is glued. Before that happens however, the cab controls need to be fitted in. Despite this being an earlier kit than the
RAF Refuelling Set with the Bowser which had no controls at all, the Austin comes with both a gear stick and a hand brake which fit into corresponding holes in the cab floor, as seen in
Photo 7. There are no foot pedals on this model and, unlike the Bowser, I haven’t tried to add them in as there just doesn’t appear to be any room on the cab floor to fit them. The only place where they might go is way to the left of the driver’s seat and would look really strange so in this instance I didn’t attempt an ‘up-grade’. The bonnet and side panels are shown ‘flat pack’ in
Photo 8, ready to be glued in together with the radiator at the front. This is a little bit fiddly, again no locating points, just the curve of the sides which butt up to the angled ridges and flat channels for the bonnet. One thing I did do here was to cut off the moulded-on canvas doors from the front of the cab bulkhead, these will be replaced later with flattened lead sheet rolled up and tied as per the full sized original.
In
Photo 9 we come to the main piece of scratch building for this model, just like the Bedford it’s a new replacement exhaust pipe and silencer. Apart from the overall improvement aspect, there was another good reason for replacing the kit part – the front of it was broken off and missing! There’s about a half-inch section missing which includes the curve to take the pipe up into the bottom of the moulded engine block. As with the Bedford, the pipe was 1.1mm styrene rod and the silencer was a length of aluminium tube. The four sets of suspension springs shown in
Photo 10 needed a little sanding down, both for the usual flash and also because two of them had apparently been glued in before, judging by the dried on poly glue, a square section diamond dust file soon removed any residue, and after gluing the springs on to the chassis, the exhaust pipe and the drive shaft links were also put on as shown in
Photo 11. The cab detail is shown in
Photo 12 after the main assemblies had been sprayed in the usual
Prodriver Poundshop Grey Primer, as can also be seen in
Photos 13 to
15.
With the roof section removed again the first section to be airbrushed in
Revell Dark Green acrylic was the cab interior shown in
Photo 16. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of the rest of the model turning dark green, but basically, that’s all the main painting there is, everything was airbrushed with multiple light coats until the whole model was sufficiently coated including the five wheel hubs which were airbrushed separately on cocktail sticks as you’ll see later. With the Dark Green complete, the whole model was given several coats of the
Humbrol Acrylic Gloss Varnish and then some shadowing with the
Humbrol Black Enamel Wash followed by a Dark Green and White mix for drybrushing the highlights. Now came another change to the basic kit. The decals provided include a series of red cross markings consisting of the red cross on a circular white background. Checking the movie again, (the ambulance only makes one brief appearance in the film after the bombing of Manston Airfield), the movie version
doesn’t have circular signs, it has
square ones! It was necessary therefore to create some new decals to replace the kit ones (which did appear a little on the ‘yellow’ side anyway!)
A couple of years ago when I was creating the decals for my HMS Victory I bought a couple of A4 sheets of inkjet decal paper, one clear and one white. I decided to make up the white backgrounds by cutting the shapes out of the white sheet. You’re supposed to laquer the surface of these sheets before dunking them in water but since I wasn’t inkjet printing anything on them I tried to use them without – big mistake! Although I eventually got the squares where I wanted them it was a very frustrating job, without a top coat of varnish the decal is both slippery and sticky on
both sides! Trying to get it to stop rolling over on itself was a nightmare! Eventually I managed it successfully and was then able to create the red crosses by cutting off strips from the Roundel and Fin Stripe decal sheet shown in the last Spitfire instalment as shown in
Photo 17. In
Photos 18 and
19, all the red cross decals are in place and the whole model has been airbrushed in 50% thinned
Humbrol Matt Acrylic Varnish (after all decals have been sealed with another coat of gloss varnish). At this point the roof is still removable.
With the roof off again it was time to finish off the cab interior by painting in the instruments on the dashboard as well as the tops of the gear stick and hand brake. The driver’s seat was then finished off in
Revell Wood Brown 382 acrylic as too was the other front passenger cushion, and the spare wheel was finally glued into place (that’s when I discovered the peg problem!) With a little more ink washing and drybrushing plus finishing off the instruments with a drop of
MicroSol Kristal Klear. The additions can be seen in
Photo 20. The last task before the roof could be permanently glued down was to glaze out the windscreens as shown in
Photo 21. These were far easier than the Bedford, all three were simple rectangles cut out of the same overhead projector film. No actual glue was required, the three panes were cut so they
just fitted into the frame and then a soft brush of
Humbrol Gloss Varnish was applied to the centre of each pane and carefully brushed to the edges where it spread itself by capillary action between the acetate and the frame sealing each section in place. It was at this stage that I noticed two things were missing from the model compared to my research photos of the real vehicles. Firstly, there was a frame mounted on the front bumper, presumably for towing or something similar and secondly, there were no rear lights at all. It was only then I realised that one of the ‘indistinct’ areas on the downloaded plans was actually that missing front frame!
A quick search in the box and there it was, still attached to the sprue. After a little clean up and a quick coat of dark green the frame was safely in place. As for the rear lights, that was another scratch build exercise as shown in
Photo 22. Just a strip of plasticard with three slices of 1.1mm styrene rod glued on to represent the red rear light, a red reflector in the middle and the turn indicator on the inside. I painted the panels up whilst still on the strip and then only needed to paint the cut edge after they had been attached to the rear chassis under the two doors. The final jobs were to make up the two canvas door rolls from
DecraLed strip, rolled out to flatten it down a bit and then cut to size and rolled up before tying a single strand of wire around each one and painting them with
Vallejo Khaki and super gluing them on at the front of the cab sides (
Photo 23).
Finally the other four wheel hubs were glued on, each one being gloss varnished and weathered with Humbrol Black Enamel Wash as shown in
Photo 24. As you can see from the Bowser cab in the background, this was actually done some time ago!
The final set of photos,
Photo 25 to
29 shows the finished K2 after some subtle
Carrs mud powder weathering posed on part of the airfield base. Now that the base and terrain is well underway I finally have somewhere to photograph the finished elements on! In conlusion, despite it’s great age, this little kit is still a well detailed and fairly easy one to build (apart from that early chassis bit!) and builds up into a lovely little model. If only they could have included a driver figure
with his legs attached and maybe a sitting passenger/medic it would have been even better!
In the next instalment, beginning the
Hawker Hurricane, and for those of us who love scratch building (Hi Kev!)
you’ll enjoy this one!
Happy Modelling ‘till then!
Robin
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
US
