Missing antennas on a scale model? I have a solution!

Thank You for your service.  

Posted by: @john3976

Find yourself a multi pack of different size diodes with long wire ends on both sides.

Hmm....not a bad tip!  I've always used piano wire, in various diameters, but never considered diodes.  Thanks John! 😎 

thats a great fix Chris, thanks. And a great career too sir!

John, first thank you for your service. Second your experience with these 1/1 scale certainly improved your model and its missing parts. I'm not a tech savvy guy so I'm wondering where you buy diodes? Thanks. 

And there I was thinking you needed a degree in electronics to fool around with diodes. Silly me.

Another method I found for making whip aerials that are less clumsy and over-scale (and less easily snapped) than the plastic aerials often found on 1:43 model police cars is to use old guitar strings. For very thin aerials that don’t need a visible base mounting on the body, you can use 1st,  2nd or 3^rd strings, depending on the thickness you want. Ideally of course you also need a very fine drill bit to make a hole in the body to glue it in place. Alternatively, you may be able to set it in a small drop of epoxy, if you can find a way to hold the aerial in position until the epoxy sets (maybe using a bit of plasticine or Blu-Tack.)

To reproduce the kind of aerial with a spring mounting

use 4th, 5th or 6th strings (again depending on the desired thickness). These strings have a brass winding around the inner wire. By holding the string with one pair of flat-nosed pliers and pulling on the end of the string with a second pair, the brass winding can be persuaded to strip off from the inner wire to reveal the required length of fine aerial. Then snip the “spring” mounting to the required length. With a little care you may also be able to strip off a few turns of the brass wire from the bottom end of the base to give enough clear wire to glue into the body (as shown on the pic below).

Here are a couple of simple examples that worked quite well

The small "bobbles" on the ends of the ambulance aerials were done by simply dipping the end of the wire into epoxy and picking up a tiny drop which will pull itself into a ball that can be painted black when dry.

Now you just need to find somebody with a guitar and beg some old strings off them. Unless you want to go down the electronics route, that is.

Another thumbs up for also using guitar strings of various gauges. They can work very well.

@bob-jackman I ordered the ones in the photo from eBay, just do a search for diodes and select a set that has multiple sizes, the set I purchased only cost just under $7 dollars.

One thing that GMP missed completely on this car was the police radio antenna, I drove three Mustangs in my career the first a 1987, the second a 1989 and the last one a 1992 and the police radio antenna was mounted on the trunk lid in the middle of the Florida Highway Patrol decal so I added a radio antenna in that location using a diode by removing the wire from one side of the diode. I used the diode as the base and glued it on.