A chopping retrospective (part 2)

Aha! I think some of you may be slowly drifting back up towards consciousness and may be in need of some more soporific reading material to settle you down again. Always happy to oblige . . .

I am not obsessed with estate cars (or station wagons, as the colonials insist on calling them), but some of them were quite attractive and weren't modelled that often. Dinky and Corgi would throw one in now and then for a bit of variety, but it was only much later that people like Schuco and Minichamps could be relied on to produce the estate version alongside the sedan. So if I particularly liked an estate, a bit of DIY was called for.

I worked out a pretty obvious basic plan for adding the new back end - cut off the rear portion of the roof, glue in a strip of brass projecting backwards and hang the new roof and rear pillars on to that - but the degree of difficulty varied according to the construction of the donor model. A heavy, hard-to-cut metal casting, or a fragile, easily-buckled white metal body, or a diecast lower body with the roof and glazing formed from a separate single piece of painted plastic, all created their own problems. New load beds had to be built into the seating unit. In the images below, the Caprice wagon and the Rover 75 tourer needed full-length strips of slightly curved, flush side glazing to make them look right, and that was quite tricky to do neatly. And of course any visible joins or wobbles in the roof, pillars or drip rails were a no-no.

Having acquired something of a taste for building wagons, I felt no obligation to limit myself to genuine 1:1 specimens, so from time to time  a rather tasteful (to my eyes) fantasy item would emerge from the workbench. The Austin Princess estate was actually an early production proposal but never got beyond a single artist's sketch which I did my best to interpret. The others, for better or worse, are pure "what if?" inventions.

On a few occasions I went in the opposite direction and turned an estate into a (genuine) sedan version which hadn't been modelled at the time Some were eventually done years later, but I didn't have time to wait.

I  have occasionally attempted a pickup, just for a bit of a change. The Austin 1800 ute (from Australia) and The Ford P100 (built in South Africa then Portugal for the European market) are real, the rest are not.

Six-wheelers were another occasional sideline, originally prompted by the 6-wheel Range Rovers produced by the Carmichael company, which looked very impressive. I made two different versions of that, one based on the 1:43 Dinky and the other on the 1:36 Corgi. The others are, to the best of my knowledge and belief, figments of the imagination.

(To be continued)