Just in case anyone is wandering by in the desperate hope of finding something of passing interest, I thought I’d do a post about my occasional flirtation with modelling six-wheelers. How bizarre is that?
Anyway, it all started when I saw photos of various 6-wheeled Range Rovers produced by a company called Carmichael. They were mainly emergency vehicles (fire tenders, pump units, etc.) but they also did a civilian version based on their Commando 6x4 chassis conversion.
So I got hold of two Dinky Range Rovers
and did a fairly simple cut-and-shut to produce an outside broadcast unit for a fictitious TV company. The two body sections (and the extended floor) were simply joined with thin strips of brass epoxied in place. With such a simple boxy shape, getting the body sections to line up nicely wasn’t a problem. I’m not sure where I found the 6 matching wheels but I thought they looked reasonable. Not having any waterslide decal printing paper, the body graphics were done with rub-down dry lettering and symbols. And yes, I think I gave it a TV receiving aerial rather than a transmitter antenna, but never mind, you get the idea.
Just for fun I sent some pics to Carmichael, and they invited me to visit their factory. They asked if I could knock out some replicas for sale but I had to tell them I was in full-time employment and strictly a one-off modeller! Anyway I came home armed with lots of good photos of the Commando, and decided that with a couple of 1:24 Bburago Range Rovers I could make a better version.
Same cut-and-shut process as before. The wheels are a pretty fair representation of the real thing and came from a couple of AMT Studebaker Avanti kits (they supplied alternative sets of chromed wheels with their kits) and I managed to rig up a working steering arrangement for “posing” purposes and gave the rear axles a bit of articulation so the model could sit on an uneven surface. The vinyl roof is Kleenex tissue painted semi-gloss black.
A few years later, Solido produced a 1:43 model of the second generation Renault Espace.
And once again I got the feeling that four wheels really weren’t enough. So I doodled a pretty simple stretch . . .
. . . and cut and shut two Solidos using my tried-and-tested method
to produce a fairly generic emergency response vehicle.
Then, flushed with success and delusions of grandeur, I experimented with something a bit more ambitious – a high roof version.
Turning this into metal involved some serious chopping, and demonstrates the advantage of working with diecast. It’s hard to cut, but you can really hack a model to pieces without worrying that the bits will bend or shatter. The various fragments were joined with a mix of brass strips and piano wire. The high roof section was formed from 3 brass hoops which were then “tiled” with thin brass sheet and blended with filler. The floor and seating unit were extended to match, and the internal seating was reconfigured using the seats from the two Solidos. (Apologies for the grainy old pre-digital photos).
The end result was a high roof minibus. The roof windows were done with thin plastic heated and bent to shape on a wooden dowel. Why the high roof? Well, it was designed to transport old people wearing Abe Lincoln hats. Pretty obvious, really.
For several years I firmly resisted the temptation to produce a 6x4 Trabant, Lincoln Town Car, Ford Transit van or London Transport Routemaster bus. Then Minichamps offered us a Ford Galaxy people carrier to play with . . .
and I happily accepted. Once again I started with a simple version on paper . . .
Turning it into metal was fairly easy, and the result was quite pleasing but not very exciting.
So I went back to the drawing board and came up with an “outdoor adventure vehicle” - basically a crew cab pickup.
This one took a bit more work because the rear load bay had to be built from plasticard. The “steered” front wheels are non-adjustable.
Then I had one of those “Hey, isn’t life more fun when things get difficult?” moments, and set about manufacturing all the grab rails, roof rack and headlamp protector grilles from thin brass rod and fine wire. Not sure if it was fun, but it WAS quite difficult. I still didn’t have decal printing paper, so had to do the graphics with liquid decal film, a home-made backing sheet and a colour inkjet printer, which was a fussy business but worked out quite well. Now ain't that pretty?
And that’s about it (Well, I did say it was an occasional thing).
Footnote 1. You can’t do everything yourself, so when Provence Moulage came up with a lovely built 1:43 version of a Citroen Cruise Crosser I was happy to just hand over the money and save myself a bit of time and trouble.
Footnote 2. I have an Esdo kit of a rather dramatic Citroen CX Tissier ambulance, which obviously attracted me as another six-wheeler for my collection.
The kit has been sitting in its box for 20 years or more. Enthusiasm has its limits. And if you want to know why I haven't done anything with 4 wheels at the front and two at the back
well, the simple answer is - I couldn't be arsed. End of story. Hope you enjoyed the pictures (I've just spent three evenings putting them all together, so you damn well better).
Well, after all that, there's LITTLE doubt YOU are a "6 wheeler!" 😬 😬 😬 Great story, pics and RESULTS!! Your models look fantastic. Two things:
1) The Carmicheal factory invited you to see their operations AND requested a few models (that you declined ).....that's PRETTY COOL and quite a compliment!
2) You would like to have a 6-wheel Lincoln Town car, really? 😯 😯
Thanks for the replies. I'm glad a few people enjoyed the post.
An interesting question arises for anyone wanting to post a fair-sized "photo essay" in any of the forums. At the end of my upload I tried to include a couple more images - a shot of the "Northwest Television Range Rover" in a suitable setting and an image of the (fairly crude) diorama set-up I used.
But I got a message saying I had exceeded the limit for the number of images allowed per post. I had 30 images and the combined total file size was about 3.4 Mb.
I went browsing online for info on WordPress limits on photo uploads, and in various places it says there are no set limits on the number of images per post, although it is advisable to downsize large images for posting - which I always do, with all the original 2-3 Mb images being reduced to around 150-250 kb.
For a web blog - which is something different - there seems to be a limit of 3GB per web page (that's 1000 times bigger!)
This technical point will be of no interest to anyone posting just a few pics, but I wonder if JK or anyone involved with the technical set-up of our forums has any comment. Maybe forum administrators can set their own limit on what they consider suitable? Maybe a forum with a higher upload limit per post costs more?
The size of the images has not been a problem for me, I rarely downsize them because it takes time and time is "money", and I am cheap, and all images I ever uploaded are still available. I never got the message for "too many images" but I probably also never tried to upload more than 30 photos.
BTW, Graeme, I am most impressed with your process, starting with a skillful drawings and ending with the graphics application techniques I am not familiar with, which look amazing in 1:43, Perhaps you may elaborate further on those.
Just in case anyone is wandering by in the desperate hope of finding something of passing interest, I thought I’d do a post about my occasional flirtation with modelling six-wheelers. How bizarre is that?
Anyway, it all started when I saw photos of various 6-wheeled Range Rovers produced by a company called Carmichael. They were mainly emergency vehicles (fire tenders, pump units, etc.) but they also did a civilian version based on their Commando 6x4 chassis conversion.
So I got hold of two Dinky Range Rovers
and did a fairly simple cut-and-shut to produce an outside broadcast unit for a fictitious TV company. The two body sections (and the extended floor) were simply joined with thin strips of brass epoxied in place. With such a simple boxy shape, getting the body sections to line up nicely wasn’t a problem. I’m not sure where I found the 6 matching wheels but I thought they looked reasonable. Not having any waterslide decal printing paper, the body graphics were done with rub-down dry lettering and symbols. And yes, I think I gave it a TV receiving aerial rather than a transmitter antenna, but never mind, you get the idea.
Just for fun I sent some pics to Carmichael, and they invited me to visit their factory. They asked if I could knock out some replicas for sale but I had to tell them I was in full-time employment and strictly a one-off modeller! Anyway I came home armed with lots of good photos of the Commando, and decided that with a couple of 1:24 Bburago Range Rovers I could make a better version.
Same cut-and-shut process as before. The wheels are a pretty fair representation of the real thing and came from a couple of AMT Studebaker Avanti kits (they supplied alternative sets of chromed wheels with their kits) and I managed to rig up a working steering arrangement for “posing” purposes and gave the rear axles a bit of articulation so the model could sit on an uneven surface. The vinyl roof is Kleenex tissue painted semi-gloss black.
A few years later, Solido produced a 1:43 model of the second generation Renault Espace.
And once again I got the feeling that four wheels really weren’t enough. So I doodled a pretty simple stretch . . .
. . . and cut and shut two Solidos using my tried-and-tested method
to produce a fairly generic emergency response vehicle.
Then, flushed with success and delusions of grandeur, I experimented with something a bit more ambitious – a high roof version.
Turning this into metal involved some serious chopping, and demonstrates the advantage of working with diecast. It’s hard to cut, but you can really hack a model to pieces without worrying that the bits will bend or shatter. The various fragments were joined with a mix of brass strips and piano wire. The high roof section was formed from 3 brass hoops which were then “tiled” with thin brass sheet and blended with filler. The floor and seating unit were extended to match, and the internal seating was reconfigured using the seats from the two Solidos. (Apologies for the grainy old pre-digital photos).
The end result was a high roof minibus. The roof windows were done with thin plastic heated and bent to shape on a wooden dowel. Why the high roof? Well, it was designed to transport old people wearing Abe Lincoln hats. Pretty obvious, really.
For several years I firmly resisted the temptation to produce a 6x4 Trabant, Lincoln Town Car, Ford Transit van or London Transport Routemaster bus. Then Minichamps offered us a Ford Galaxy people carrier to play with . . .
and I happily accepted. Once again I started with a simple version on paper . . .
Turning it into metal was fairly easy, and the result was quite pleasing but not very exciting.
So I went back to the drawing board and came up with an “outdoor adventure vehicle” - basically a crew cab pickup.
This one took a bit more work because the rear load bay had to be built from plasticard. The “steered” front wheels are non-adjustable.
Then I had one of those “Hey, isn’t life more fun when things get difficult?” moments, and set about manufacturing all the grab rails, roof rack and headlamp protector grilles from thin brass rod and fine wire. Not sure if it was fun, but it WAS quite difficult. I still didn’t have decal printing paper, so had to do the graphics with liquid decal film, a home-made backing sheet and a colour inkjet printer, which was a fussy business but worked out quite well. Now ain't that pretty?
And that’s about it (Well, I did say it was an occasional thing).
Footnote 1. You can’t do everything yourself, so when Provence Moulage came up with a lovely built 1:43 version of a Citroen Cruise Crosser I was happy to just hand over the money and save myself a bit of time and trouble.
Footnote 2. I have an Esdo kit of a rather dramatic Citroen CX Tissier ambulance, which obviously attracted me as another six-wheeler for my collection.
The kit has been sitting in its box for 20 years or more. Enthusiasm has its limits. And if you want to know why I haven't done anything with 4 wheels at the front and two at the back
well, the simple answer is - I couldn't be arsed. End of story. Hope you enjoyed the pictures (I've just spent three evenings putting them all together, so you damn well better).
Just in case anyone is wandering by in the desperate hope of finding something of passing interest, I thought I’d do a post about my occasional flirtation with modelling six-wheelers. How bizarre is that?
Anyway, it all started when I saw photos of various 6-wheeled Range Rovers produced by a company called Carmichael. They were mainly emergency vehicles (fire tenders, pump units, etc.) but they also did a civilian version based on their Commando 6x4 chassis conversion.
So I got hold of two Dinky Range Rovers
and did a fairly simple cut-and-shut to produce an outside broadcast unit for a fictitious TV company. The two body sections (and the extended floor) were simply joined with thin strips of brass epoxied in place. With such a simple boxy shape, getting the body sections to line up nicely wasn’t a problem. I’m not sure where I found the 6 matching wheels but I thought they looked reasonable. Not having any waterslide decal printing paper, the body graphics were done with rub-down dry lettering and symbols. And yes, I think I gave it a TV receiving aerial rather than a transmitter antenna, but never mind, you get the idea.
Just for fun I sent some pics to Carmichael, and they invited me to visit their factory. They asked if I could knock out some replicas for sale but I had to tell them I was in full-time employment and strictly a one-off modeller! Anyway I came home armed with lots of good photos of the Commando, and decided that with a couple of 1:24 Bburago Range Rovers I could make a better version.
Same cut-and-shut process as before. The wheels are a pretty fair representation of the real thing and came from a couple of AMT Studebaker Avanti kits (they supplied alternative sets of chromed wheels with their kits) and I managed to rig up a working steering arrangement for “posing” purposes and gave the rear axles a bit of articulation so the model could sit on an uneven surface. The vinyl roof is Kleenex tissue painted semi-gloss black.
A few years later, Solido produced a 1:43 model of the second generation Renault Espace.
And once again I got the feeling that four wheels really weren’t enough. So I doodled a pretty simple stretch . . .
. . . and cut and shut two Solidos using my tried-and-tested method
to produce a fairly generic emergency response vehicle.
Then, flushed with success and delusions of grandeur, I experimented with something a bit more ambitious – a high roof version.
Turning this into metal involved some serious chopping, and demonstrates the advantage of working with diecast. It’s hard to cut, but you can really hack a model to pieces without worrying that the bits will bend or shatter. The various fragments were joined with a mix of brass strips and piano wire. The high roof section was formed from 3 brass hoops which were then “tiled” with thin brass sheet and blended with filler. The floor and seating unit were extended to match, and the internal seating was reconfigured using the seats from the two Solidos. (Apologies for the grainy old pre-digital photos).
The end result was a high roof minibus. The roof windows were done with thin plastic heated and bent to shape on a wooden dowel. Why the high roof? Well, it was designed to transport old people wearing Abe Lincoln hats. Pretty obvious, really.
For several years I firmly resisted the temptation to produce a 6x4 Trabant, Lincoln Town Car, Ford Transit van or London Transport Routemaster bus. Then Minichamps offered us a Ford Galaxy people carrier to play with . . .
and I happily accepted. Once again I started with a simple version on paper . . .
Turning it into metal was fairly easy, and the result was quite pleasing but not very exciting.
So I went back to the drawing board and came up with an “outdoor adventure vehicle” - basically a crew cab pickup.
This one took a bit more work because the rear load bay had to be built from plasticard. The “steered” front wheels are non-adjustable.
Then I had one of those “Hey, isn’t life more fun when things get difficult?” moments, and set about manufacturing all the grab rails, roof rack and headlamp protector grilles from thin brass rod and fine wire. Not sure if it was fun, but it WAS quite difficult. I still didn’t have decal printing paper, so had to do the graphics with liquid decal film, a home-made backing sheet and a colour inkjet printer, which was a fussy business but worked out quite well. Now ain't that pretty?
And that’s about it (Well, I did say it was an occasional thing).
Footnote 1. You can’t do everything yourself, so when Provence Moulage came up with a lovely built 1:43 version of a Citroen Cruise Crosser I was happy to just hand over the money and save myself a bit of time and trouble.
Footnote 2. I have an Esdo kit of a rather dramatic Citroen CX Tissier ambulance, which obviously attracted me as another six-wheeler for my collection.
The kit has been sitting in its box for 20 years or more. Enthusiasm has its limits. And if you want to know why I haven't done anything with 4 wheels at the front and two at the back
well, the simple answer is - I couldn't be arsed. End of story. Hope you enjoyed the pictures (I've just spent three evenings putting them all together, so you damn well better).
3 simple words here... "What the Hell?"
What an amazing post..and with pics !!
I'm stoked for weeks on end !!!
What year did you do these ?
I think perhaps the producers of the TV show 'Lost in Space' stole your idea for the 'Chariot'.
Well, these models were done quite a few years ago. Nowadays you can buy A4 sheets of decal transfer paper for inkjet or laser printers, so you can put together text in any font or colour, images created in PowerPoint, imported logos or whatever and print out waterslide decals pretty easily. But back then these didn’t exist (or I wasn’t aware of their being available) so it was more of a DIY job.
Dry lettering was available from companies such as Letraset and Decadry.
You had to rub an individual letter or symbol lightly with the tip of a ballpoint to loosen its grip on the backing sheet, then position it carefully on the model and rub it again so it would (hopefully) transfer to the model. Positioning each letter correctly and getting it to transfer cleanly on to a paint surface that was maybe a little rough took a bit of patience (and a few wasted letters along the way).
There is a product called Microscale Liquid Decal which I used for the “High Trails” 6x4.
It is mainly used for strengthening old unused decals that are starting to craze and could fall apart. After a coating of liquid decal has dried, the decal can be safely soaked and slid on to the model. I think it may have been Rod Ward of Model Auto Review who told me that you could apply a coat of this liquid decal film on to a suitable sheet of backing paper, then draw or paint or print your home-made decal on to it, then apply another liquid coat on top. When it was all dry, you could cut out the decal and float it on warm water for a few seconds. The base layer of liquid decal would soften and come away from the backing sheet and the decal could then be slid on to the model – but if you soaked a bit too long, both layers of film would dissolve and the decal would disintegrate! So it was a fiddly and quite nerve-wracking business, but it worked.
As I say, things are much easier now, and with commercial decal sheets and a colour printer I've been able to do some body graphics relatively easily. In the pics below the stripes and lettering on the Seatac Shuttle, the Zip Cab and the Flightcab (all of them fictitious companies) and the striped roof awning on the camper were composed in PowerPoint. The Sheriff badge on the Edsel police car and the Firebird logo on the Pontiac Type K were imported images. The body stripes and most of the graphics on the Marina racer were also done in PowerPoint (I did cheat and use a few badges from a kit decal sheet). I wouldn't have wanted to attempt any of this with the older methods!
@graeme-ogg Thanks Graeme, very informative. I have several projects that would require creating or outsourcing decals, and that is a skill that I have to work on.
Well, as I say, things are much easier these days. You can assemble quite a complex decal on the PC from a mix of imported or hand-made images, bits of photos, and bits of computer-generated text in any font and colour you want, and juggle them into a combined image (I tend to use PowerPoint, which makes it very easy to position the various elements and re-size them, then select them all and "group" them to make a single image of the required size). Then print the file to decal paper. Job done. Just remember to copy the completed decal several times on one page before printing because as sure as hell you will apply one wrongly to an irregular or curved surface and wreck it when trying to adjust it. (Said he, from bitter experience.)
Now you're making me feel old. The Range Rovers were both done in the early 70s. The Renault Espace conversions appeared in Model Auto review No. 75 in September 1993 and the Ford Galaxies sometime in 1997. Where the hell have I been since then? Beats me.
