Making the horse-drawn Trabant

If any of you serious-minded “handicrafts” people ever wander into The Lounge for a bit of light intellectual stimulation you may know that there is a long-running joke about a horse-drawn Trabant.

I felt that a spoof was called for, and the original plan was just to fake up a box and swear blind there was a model inside it. (Sorry, no pictures. Too delicate to be exposed to the light). Various bits of image and text were composed in PowerPoint, saved as separate files then “warped” in Photoshop to fit the perspective of the box. I’m no graphics expert but I thought it came out quite well.

Then things got a bit silly when I figured that maybe I should actually have a go at making the model as well. I haven’t actually done any modelling work for a couple of years or more. I ran into persistent problems with a couple of projects and my nerve and concentration just went, so I walked away and could never quite face going back to the workbench. So this was a “no pressure” fun project to get me moving again, a chance to re-discover the old tricks and techniques and to continue my investigation of one of life’s most enduring mysteries – where DO those tiny, carefully-crafted bits go when they spring out of the tweezers?  Personally I incline towards the Multiple Universes theory, but firm evidence is almost impossible to find (as indeed are the small parts).

Anyway, I got a cheap unboxed 1:43 Trabant (Vitesse) and sawed it in half.

The floor was shortened. You can maybe see that the original seats are far too shallow and perched too high in the body for a figure to sit inside, so I found a suitable back seat in the parts box. The rusty front mudguards are thin brass, painted with a smeared mix of orange, dark brown and gunmetal paint. They are supported by a shaped piece of thin brass rod looped and glued around the wheel hub.

I ordered a “Rington’s Tea” horse and cart set by Lledo which various sites suggested was roughly 1:43. It wasn’t. Alongside the Trabbie the horse looked like a Pyrenean mountain dog (or possibly a large Alsatian). So I sent off for a couple of good-quality “7mm” white metal horses. 7mm is 1:43 scale so they should have been OK, but they kind of towered over the car, so I spent an interesting morning sawing two thin slices out of each leg of one horse to lower the ride height. I also sawed a wedge out of the base of the neck to make it more horizontal and bring the head lower. The result is a little stumpy but still recognisably horse-like, and a better match for the height of the car body.

I found a plastic figure who looked like he might serve as a driver but his arms were down by his sides and his lower legs were bent at right angles, so he couldn’t sit properly or hold the reins. The arms were carefully sawn off and repositioned, and the legs were cut through behind the knees and a small plastic wedge glued in to straighten them a bit.

Manufacturing parts of a horse’s harness are not part of the car modeller’s core skill set but I did my best. The cart shafts are polystyrene rod “textured” with sandpaper before painting, and the hoop over the collar was bent from brass rod, again textured and painted. The little loops that the reins run through are small watch hands glued into holes drilled in the harness. The rope reins are heavy-duty shoemaker’s thread. And the horse’s blinkers are small plastic wing mirrors.

I also made a couple of internal accessories for the cart, including the spade with an aluminium blade and painted brass shaft and handle. The coil of wire is jewellery wire.

The model base was painted with glue and model railway gravel was sprinkled on. The grass verges are strips cut from an old piece of artificial turf. The horse and “cart” were positioned and firmly glued down on the base before the shafts and reins were added to finish the job.

Since I was seriously out of practice and had to re-acquaint myself with all my tools, materials and “tricks of the trade”, this project took a couple of weeks of quite intense sessions for the model, plus a bit of time Photoshopping the box and the card insert. But at least it has got me going again and I am now launched into what you might call a more serious project, to be revealed in due course (unless I screw it up and lose my nerve again!)