A few HO trucks & loads

[Bill Gill]

Helmut, Thank you, Sehr gut! for your Jordan firetrucks! Those Jordan kits are a challenge to assemble and yours look very well done and that was all the way back in 1974. I think you were correct not to age them. Any firetrucks I have seen still in service are carefully pampered by the crew at the firehouse. A clean vehicle is much harder to model, every little flaw looks huge. Your models like very good.

Ray, I agree, figures that are in relaxed poses are much better than those frozen in mid-action in perpetuity though big city street scenes need people at least during normal times of the day, and some of them probably ought to be ambling along the sidewalks.

Here's one experiment with a figure poised just before his action. Evaluated strictly as a realistic element in the scene, he is obviously lacking, but I like him. Where he is posed he is either unloading full cans for the morning milk train or retrieving his empties in the afternoon. Either way he adds more information to the scene. I like the anticipation of him getting ready to heft another full can and swing it toward the platform, or conversely catching his breath after plunking a can back down on the tailgate. An empty can weighs around 35 lbs., a full one can be about 110 lbs. He's doing a lot of work there everyday!

I also like the mechanics of this particular figure and milk can. They are not attached to the pickup. The weight of the metal can balances the farmer who is only glued to the handles. That way the can/farmer pair is quickly and easily repositioned if need be to arrange a better pose.

The figure originally had a nondescript blob of miscast styrene for a head. He got a new head, posed to fit his task and his arms were repositioned to grip the handles. He is cleanly attired despite working with dairy cows because he had to be to meet sanitation standards, but he also represents a time when veterinarians wore a suit and tie and hat out to the farm and put on coveralls to do their work. I like trying to represent details like that.

cropped photo by my son, William Gill

[finescalerr]

The modeling and the photo are quite good. Satisfactory. -- Russ

[Hydrostat]

Ray, I agree, figures that are in relaxed poses are much better than those frozen in mid-action in perpetuity though big city street scenes need people at least during normal times of the day, and some of them probably ought to be ambling along the sidewalks.

Bill, I like the pose of the figure, and you're surely right with your estimation about relaxed poses. The smaller scale gets, the more difficult it is to have convincing figures. Even in big scale, where people started to experiment with 3D scanning and printing and amazing results still the problem of the pose remains, because none of those scanners is able to catch a person in motion. It always bothered me a bit, that railway modeling is something about running trains, but the environment remains frozen - despite car systems and some more nick-nack. So maybe photography remains the choice to present a model. And then there's the part of playing trains .

Interesting how coarse the engine in the background looks in it's detailing (e.g. railing) compared to your truck and figures. What I didn't manage to see due to resolution: Is there someone else sitting in the truck's cab?

Volker

[Bill Gill]

Russ, I'm beginning to feel like a member of the forum, having received my first "satisfactory"! or at least half of one, the other half (at least) goes to my son for his photo. Thanks.

Volker, the engine was new to the layout when this photo was posed and it had been quickly painted & decaled, decoder installed and pressed into service for one of the club's two annual operating sessions. There are other more detailed locomotives on the layout, but there is also the need for their details to not be so delicate that the motive power and rolling stock cannot survive the 'routine' bumps and mishaps encountered during the sessions. Most of the student operators are new to modeling, let alone model railroading and some of the guest operators are usually new to the layout, so there is a learning curve for handling equipment and most of the equipment must be able to survive that phase.

One of the things I like about the club is its goal of introducing students who have never used tools for anything to model making and to going out and examining and photographing the prototypes rather than using other models as references. Some of the scenes on the layout are very good depictions of the actual location. Several graduates have gone on to become (prototype) railroad photographers or working for companies producing highly accurate models.

Yes, the farmer's wife is taking a quick nap in the cab of the truck. If it is morning, they have both just finished milking all their cows and some of their early morning chores before driving the milk to the  railroad platform. If it is afternoon, they have been doing more chores and she is catching a brief break while waiting for the empty cans to be loaded into the truck. It is a small, hardscrabble dairy, partially reflected in the condition of the truck and also partially because they are still using milk cans at a time when the larger dairies are starting to use holding tanks instead.

[Bill Gill]

Here is another Classic Metal Works pickup truck I detailed. Some of you have seen it before elsewhere, but Joel's post today with his nice boxes of vegetables  http://www.finescalerr.com/smf/index.php?topic=2483.90 reminded me this truck hadn't been posted here. My son, Will, took the photo of the truck waiting at the crossing.

This pickup has a load of McIntosh apples. NY state is the number one grower of macs. They are an early fall apple so the load helps reinforce the New England Berkshire and Western RR's location and its late September time period. I learned a lot from this model. Apples are heavier than I thought. Each box holds one bushel. It's a bushel measured by weight not volume, and the weight varies slightly depending on variety of apple. In this case a bushel is about 42 lbs. There are 24 bushels in the half ton pickup, so it is slightly overloaded and the sagging rear suspension shows that. 24 bushels is about 3500 apples. I cheated. The bottom layer of boxes is a slab of styrene and the bottoms of the top boxes are as thick as half the depth of the boxes, so I only had to make about 1/4 of that apples to fill the truck.

The apple boxes were copied from two prototype styles. They are 0.05 styrene. I thought about using paper for the sides because it would be scale thickness for the boxes, but the vehicles get moved around a lot for photos and layout maintenance, so opted for something a hair stronger.

The apples are Fimo clay. Red yellow and white clay were throughly mixed to a uniform 'mac red' and rolled out into a long skinny snake Another snake of green, yellow and white was mixed and rolled. The two were twisted together and rolled out into a snake about 3 scale inches thick, chopped into bits about 3 scale inches long and individually rolled into apples, poked with a fine needle for the stem end and baked at 225 ^oF per Fimo instructions. (Serving with brown sugar and cream is optional).

The close up of the back of the truck shows an attempt to represent the small chain that holds up the tailgate when it's lowered. The smallest chain I found was 40 links/inch - far too heavy. This 'chain' is four strands of copper wire from a broken earbud headset. I braided them loosely together and then folded a short length in half to look like the chain when the tailgate is up.

[Bill Gill]

Here's the Fimo clay. It's a polymer clay similar to Sculpy. I liked being able to mix the colors for the apples without having to paint them all.

[finescalerr]

Satisfactory. -- Russ

[SandiaPaul]

Indeed, that looks great!

Paul

[Bill Gill]

Thanks, Russ & Paul.

[Ray Dunakin]

Great job! Modeling it with the rear sagging under the load is a nice, often-overlooked touch that greatly heightens the realism.

[Bill Gill]

Thanks, Ray

[Bill Gill]

Here's one more pickup truck. It's included because the weathering was inspired by techniques from this forum. The truck was originally yellow. It was given an overall spray of a rusty brown and then the blue (and red) were brush painted in a couple dozen thin 'washes'. The texture is admittedly coarse in the photos, but the visual appearance on the layout is good. The right side view shows attempts at some small scrapes and dents on the front fender and door.

[Hydrostat]

Bill,

i think both items apples and trucks are made very good and they do show a convincing appearance.

The texture is admittedly coarse in the photos, but the visual appearance on the layout is good.

Macro photography is counterproductive in the small scales, if the surfaces can't match up to the blow-up. Of course those pictures show a lot about your techniques and detailing, but I would be interested in some additional pictures from a rather conventional distance, too.

Cheers,
Volker

[Ray Dunakin]

I especially like the look of the rusted chrome parts, and the mismatched fender is a nice touch.

[finescalerr]

The weathering is most satisfactory, especially in light of what you were working with. -- Russ