Been working lately on a 1:48 derelict 1925 Ford Fordor, as a background model for a small roadhouse diorama. Plan is to have the car completely rusted out and derelict, abandoned in weeds, undergrowth, and trees behind the roadhouse. I started this project a little over ten years ago... after all, you don't want to rush into these things! At the time I posted some pictures here. Car began life as an Ertl 1:45 cast metal piece which I disassembled and blasted off all the paint. Since the finished piece is essentially going to be largely buried in the weeds, undergrowth, and trees, I figure the slight scale difference is not going to be noticeable. First photo below shows basically what I'm working toward, though I will have some higher undergrowth to help blend the slightly oversize car into the scene. Second photo from ten years ago shows the cowl and body in original condition after blasting off the paint. The first piece I tackled was the cowl, removing all the gross cast exterior detail and thinning the casting, accomplished with a lot of flex shaft work with dental burrs, filing, and riffler work. I cut the cowl into three pieces and reassembled it in open position so that the remains of the engine could be seen. I added some half-round brass pieces to represent the louvres. Third photo shows the completed cowl assembly. Now I'm working on the fenders, thinning them out, adding dents, and a bullet hole or two.
Hi Paul
Great to see some of your modellings.
cheers Kim
Excellent project! Hopefully it won't take another ten years to complete. :-)
I'm counting on its looking excellent ... if you finish it. -- Russ
That looks delicious. I'm looking forward to see more!
Very - very Nice looking forward to seeing more of this very neat little diorama
Barney
Looking forward to this. That's a neat little car!
Jerry
Thanks gents... thinning the castings is a slow, tedious process, but I'm certainly not going to spend ten years on it! For one thing I have too many other projects waiting in the wings and Mrs. R is cracking the whip to get some of these things finished. Nothing like self-preservation as a motivator... ;)
Took a break from the grinding and filing work to do a test piece for the damp, rotting, dirty wood floorboards for the car. Used an air eraser with 240 grit media to wear away the wood, then followed that with Silverwood and some Aquarelle pencil work. I'm reasonably happy with the result, certainly acceptable I think for what is in reality a background model.
That just "oozes" rotteness, lovely.
Les
Another word for the Forum Dictionary " rottenness" along with Grot /fester/gunge /crud and not forgetting Rust it ads to the atmosphere of things
lovely stuff just keep coming - I cannot wait another 10 years !!
Barney
Perhaps yu should market cans of grot/fester, etc
Les
Quote from: Les Tindall on March 28, 2021, 10:41:04 AM
Perhaps yu should market cans of grot/fester, etc
Les
It's already marketed here in Canada... it's called Bud Lite. ;)
Bud Lite is simply called swill in my book. Only useful if you love to urinate.
Quote from: Lawton Maner on March 29, 2021, 01:19:51 PM
Bud Lite is simply called swill in my book. Only useful if you love to urinate.
Very true, but then everyone needs a hobby...
Decided to re-photograph the wood test. The previous shot was taken on an overcast day and the wood appeared darker overall than it actually is due to the lower light conditions. Sun came out today so I shot it again with the result being much closer to the actual piece. Shows the importance of having enough light when trying to accurately replicate colour.
Thats lovely for a "bit of Rot"
it makes a lot of difference a bit of sun for good lighting
Barney
Looks great!
Not much time for the model bench these days what with the supposed arrival of spring and all the work delayed by winter, that needs to be done on the property. However, I did make time to prepare the engine for the derelict Ford (minus the water hoses which will be part of the final assembly). The engine casting was robbed from an old Scale Structures kit I had sitting on the shelf. I cut off the cast-on sparkplugs and replaced them with .040" dia and .030" dia brass tubing assemblies. The top ends of the .030" dia tubes were turned down to represent the insulated shaft of the spark plugs. The bigger issue though was the fan/fan belt which was a horrible old cerrobend casting, so I opted to scratch a replacement.
The pulley and hub are simple brass turnings. I made the fan blade by sandwiching a piece of .008" T. brass shim stock to a piece of .025" T. styrene, then glued a CAD drawing of the blade onto the brass. The overall dia. of the fan blade is .270". I drilled a centre hole for the shaft, then cut out the blade with a jeweler's saw and dressed the edges with a file. I peeled off the drawing and dropped the brass/styrene sandwich into a bath of MEK which dissolved away the styrene leaving just the brass blade. I then annealed each vane of the blade and radiused each vane by forming it with a small embossing tool in a fixture into which I had milled a small half-round channel with a ball mill.
The next challenge was the broken fan belt. I laminated 10 pieces of Watchpaper (a very fine tissue paper, non-oxidizing and used to wrap watch movements, parts, etc) using water-soluble glue. I clamped the glued paper into a vise to cure to insure proper gluing and consistent thickness (approx. .012"). Once cured, I sliced off a strip .018" W. There's a sample of the straight stock in the first photo below (the items are sitting on a piece of Watchpaper tissue). I then dampened a small section in the centre of the strip and formed it over a piece of nylon rod into which I had turned a duplicate of the brass fan hub (in the rear of the photo), weighting each end of the strip with clamping tweezers. Once cured, I had a tall U-shaped piece. Then cut one arm short and the other longer at a length that would lay into the bottom of the motor casting. I then dampened that end and set the belt into place on the brass pulley and carefully prodded and pushed the damp end into position. Once cured, I coloured the belt with permanent marker and various dusting powders. The finished belt is at the front in the first photo. The other two photos show the engine as it stands now. BTW there is no distributor on this engine, the plug wires all run to the firewall.
And now, it's time to get back to chainsaw work... apparently the power company wants us to remove two more trees on the property!
Impressive. And it must have taken a few hours to cobble together those parts. -- Russ
Engine looks great..be lucky you don't have to remove 10 ash trees like a neighbor does. All dead from Emerald Ash Borer
Quote from: finescalerr on May 06, 2021, 12:56:30 PM
Impressive. And it must have taken a few hours to cobble together those parts. -- Russ
Thanks Russ... yes it did take a few hours but spread out in fits and starts over a period of several weeks. Be glad when I can get back to a regular schedule in the workshop.
Quote from: SandiaPaul on May 06, 2021, 06:10:50 PM
Engine looks great..be lucky you don't have to remove 10 ash trees like a neighbor does. All dead from Emerald Ash Borer
Thanks Paul. Definitely not lucky. We took down 7 Ash trees last October (remaining sawing, splitting, and cleanup of those halted because of winter in November) and now there are to be 2 more. After that there are 3 more large Ash that will need to come down in the foreseeable future, all because of the Emerald Ash Borer. Sad to see them go, but better that than to have them come crashing down onto the house, garage, or barn.
Beautiful work Paul!
Great job! I like your idea of bonding the thin sheet brass to styrene for cutting, then melting away the styrene.
Quote from: Chuck Doan on May 06, 2021, 08:43:51 PM
Beautiful work Paul!
Thank you Chuck... much appreciated!
Quote from: Ray Dunakin on May 06, 2021, 11:07:51 PM
Great job! I like your idea of bonding the thin sheet brass to styrene for cutting, then melting away the styrene.
Thanks Ray. Bonding the shim brass to the styrene made a difficult job much easier and prevented the brass sheet from deforming while cutting.
Here's a shot of the Ash trees after they were felled at the end of October. There were 7 felled in total, running along the front of the property.
This second shot shows the start of the process of cutting up the trees. The smaller logs were chopped into approx. foot-long chunks which we started splitting for fire wood. The large trunks were chainsaw milled into a few 3' dia. slabs and some 4" T. x 8' L. planks which are now curing in the barn. One trunk remains to be cut into planks and there remains a huge amount of splitting to be done. The stumps were all ground late in November just before the ground froze. Work halted because of winter and with spring being so wet and cold this year, we haven't been able to make much headway on the final trunk and the splitting. With two more trees to come down shortly, it looks like this process is destined to continue for some time. Going to take years for the front lawn to recover.
Was any of the wood usable for rough construction or furniture? -- Russ
Russ:
Home milled wood makes good furniture if air dried carefully. Remember that before the middle of the 19th century all furniture was made from air dried lumber. I could point out that when you took your first shop classes that all that was available. I on the other hand had to make my first shop projects from rocks.
WP:
After 3 years of careful air drying, indoors, we all expect you to move up to 1:1 scale and make some impressive furniture. Ash can be a difficult wood to work with as it usually needs scraping to get a good surface for finishing rather then sanding. Please make sure all of the slabs are properly stickered and weighted on top and like a good wine the magic ingredient is time. A simple first project could be a shadow box to put the diorama in.
Quote from: finescalerr on May 07, 2021, 12:22:25 PM
Was any of the wood usable for rough construction or furniture? -- Russ
Quote from: Lawton Maner on May 07, 2021, 01:46:41 PM
Russ:
Home milled wood makes good furniture if air dried carefully. Remember that before the middle of the 19th century all furniture was made from air dried lumber. I could point out that when you took your first shop classes that all that was available. I on the other hand had to make my first shop projects from rocks.
WP:
After 3 years of careful air drying, indoors, we all expect you to move up to 1:1 scale and make some impressive furniture. Ash can be a difficult wood to work with as it usually needs scraping to get a good surface for finishing rather then sanding. Please make sure all of the slabs are properly stickered and weighted on top and like a good wine the magic ingredient is time. A simple first project could be a shadow box to put the diorama in.
Russ and Lawton: That is the reason we've been milling the large 4" T. slabs in the hope that once dried, they will be a source for some useful lumber. The heartwood and sapwood appear to be sound throughout. The damage from the Ash Borer is limited to the cambium layer so the inner and outer bark just fall away. We won't really know how useful the wood will be though until it is dried. The large slaps are being set up with proper stickering in the barn for drying. An Amish friend is providing a great deal of help with the chain sawing and splitting in return for the wood. He'll have a major supply of firewood by the time we're finished and I believe he's hoping to get some construction wood and wood for a large table out of the long slabs (at least his wife has told him he is... :) ). I've saved two nominally 3' dia. x 4" T. cross-section slabs which are drying in my "heavy" workshop in the garage with the intent of producing two coffee tables. It will be a rather daunting challenge as I have no machinery big enough to handle such large pieces, so will have to rely on a substantial amount of router work followed by hand-plane and scraper work to create usable table tops.
Lawton, thanks for the insights into working with ash. I've never worked it before. I studied furniture design and construction at the Wendel Castle School back in the 1980s and went on to be one of the founding staff members at the short-lived Genoa Furniture Design School which came about when Wendel sold his school to the School for American Craftsmen at RIT. Unfortunately, I had to stop working with wood at that level because of health reasons. Turns out I'm allergic to trees and have to wear a respirator when working wood for any 1:1 scale construction. Outdoors I can get away with a mask when chainsawing. I don't have any issues working with wood in the model shop fortunately, mainly because the pieces are so small and I'm creating very little dust, but as soon as I break out the circular saw, routers, sander, planes, and scrapers, on goes the respirator. Bit of a pain...
Hi Paul.
interesting project lovely engine.
If you don't like woodwork just sell the cured slabs.
cheers
Quote from: 1-32 on May 08, 2021, 11:58:49 AM
Hi Paul.
interesting project lovely engine.
If you don't like woodwork just sell the cured slabs.
cheers
Thanks Kim. I actually enjoy woodwork, the problem is it doesn't like me. If it turns out that after three years or so of drying and likewise a three-year increase in my age (definitely into the O.F. era now) that I'm unable to move around 200+ lb slabs of wood, I'll just give them to my Amish friend to do with as he pleases.
Finally time for an update on this project, the background model derelict 1925 Ford Fordor sedan. It's been a hectic summer leaving little time for the modelshop. Why is it when you retire, your life seems to become busier than when you were working full-time, that's not how it is supposed to work! Maybe it's because when you become old and decrepit, even the simplest tasks take longer. ;) Anyway, here's a shot of the completed engine, frame, and fender assembly for the derelict Ford. The large rough hole in the floor is to accommodate a tree that has grown up through the car, which will be put in place once the car is complete and in position on the diorama. Final weathering touches will be added at that time to blend it into the environment. Now to continue thinning the body casting and building the destroyed wood roof for the car.
DerelictFordWIP1Sm.jpg
Satisfactory. -- Russ
Wow! That looks fantastic!
Thanks Russ & Ray. Just for a point of reference, here is a photo of what I started with, the original ERTL car. Note: not my photo. I couldn't find mine, but located this uncredited shot online.
ERTLFordFordor.jpg
But that one looks so much newer and better .... -- ssuR
Hi Paul.
seeing I am too young to remember your other models I must say that I am impressed.
cheers Kim
Quote from: finescalerr on September 09, 2021, 12:20:07 PM
But that one looks so much newer and better .... -- ssuR
I know, right! I struggled making the decision, should I or shouldn't I attack this beautiful example of die-cast and plastic art... ;)
Quote from: 1-32 on September 09, 2021, 08:25:15 PM
Hi Paul.
seeing I am too young to remember your other models I must say that I am impressed.
cheers Kim
Thank you Kim, much appreciated.