Old Dog's CTA entry...Gone Steyr Crazy

[Old Dog]

I have made my donation and this will be sort of a one man group build. Now before anyone gets their shorts in a knot I did discuss this with Bob back in August and he seemed OK with it at that time, however, he was experiencing some sort of an air conditioning failure so he may deny it :gogo I will be building five kits, one stock kit with a lot of AM and one each of four different conversions and it will all be contained in this thread. So as not to cause any issues with the drawing I will excuse myself from that. Be my luck I'd get one of the kits I donated anyway :facepalm

Also as an added incentive to myself to finish all five of these I will pledge an additional $10 each for any kit I don't complete by the deadline. So for the good of the cause you can pull for me to fail

OK, here is the stack of what I will be using...

And the obligatory time stamps

Please note the three boxes in the background are still in their factory shrink wrap so I didn't open them.

I was originally going to do these in the soft skins campaign but felt it would better the cause here. And for Bob who, back when I mentioned joining the soft skin campaign, said he never saw me build anything like this before... back when I reentered the hobby about 8 years or so ago I built a soft skin which each new kit I started so I had something to do while paint was drying and so on, eventually I stopped doing these but not before doing these...

GAZ-67

Krupp Boxer

Kurogane

and this all resin Horch

I will detail all of the various parts of this build over the next few days, wish me luck (or not)

 

[razordws]

Cool!

 

[lupanzer]

Amazing stuff ...good luck :coolio

Luiz

 

[jugjunkie]

This will be GOOOOOD!!! Good luck and I hope you finish 'em off with time for another OD :fencing

 

[SA Dave]

This is going to be AWESOME :drinks

 

[moon puppy]

With all these exclusions some folks are going to be rackin' up on prizes!

Go on Gary, looking forward to this.

 

[Old Dog]

Well since everything seems to be copacetic let me expand a bit on my intentions here. The basic kit is the Tamiya 1/48 Steyr 1500. This kit was one of their early releases in this series and comes with a metal chassis. This seems to be generally disliked but it's not an issue for me. Lets look at the basic kit. Two sprues in yellow make up the kit, with a clear part for the windscreen and the metal chassis and a small decal sheet. Three paint schemes are listed, basic gray, sand and a mix of sand and green.

Typical Tamiya quality and enough detail for the scale to suit me.

In order to help me keep track of these 5 builds I have numbered them S-1 through S-5.

I was originally going to use some PE from Hauler to replace the grills and hood vents, It looks very nice but as a trial I used the hood from the command wagon and spent some time opening one of the hood vents and decided it would be way too time consuming, not only carving out 5 openings per hood but also fitting the rather delicate PE, two pieces per opening and decided I would save it for another build.

S-1 will be built pretty much out of the box and to it will be added a stowage set from Blackdog. Cast in resin with nice sharp details and should look great if my painting skills are up to it. It also comes with a set of wheels and tires with chains so this one will most likely end up an Eastern Front vehicle. Shown below is the Blackdog set. It came with no instructions, not that any are needed but some painting suggestions might have been nice. Also if any of you armor guys know what the three prong items are, let me know, they don't show in the photo on the box and as you can see not all of them survived transit intact.

S-2 will be the radio truck conversion, a mostly resin conversion with a sheet of clear acetate for windows and some PE...

S-3 will be a low bed truck with a square wood cab...

S-4 will be an ambulance...

and S-5 will be a high bed truck with a different cab...

All four of the vehicles had wooden cabs in spite of the two looking more like steel cabs. I saw these somewhere labeled as cardboard cabs but I assume that meant some sort of a pressed composite like masonite or some such, don't think even treated cardboard would hold up very well.

According to what I could find online there were a total of 12450 Steyr 1500 A vehicles produced in Austria between 1941-44. Additional 5600 were made by co-producer Auto-Union’s Wanderer factory at Sigmar and Audi at Zwickau in Germany. In spite of this I found photos of at least the ones with specialized bodies to be some what scarce. Although I think I do have at least one photo of each of the four types.

The hardest part of the build will be removing casting blocks and cleaning up the resin parts. The other hard part may be deciding on paint schemes. I definitely don't want them all field gray ! As a starting point I'm probably going to assume they all came out of the factory during the time that gray was the standard color and paint the frames and interior parts that color. If nothing else it will serve as a primer for later on. Although I didn't find a lot of useful photos I think it's pretty safe to assume that when the color schemes changed that these, like most of the other vehicles, were painted in the field to suit conditions and I have plenty of photos and profiles of other trucks to drawn on. S-1 will most likely end up gray with a winter white wash and the ambulance will probably stay gray the other three are undecided at this time.

Enough verbiage for now, should start to see some progress next update !

 

[SA Dave]

I am looking forward to all of them BUT S1 looks amazing with that resin stowage :drinks

 

[Heavens Eagle]

Gary, those three prong deals are the handles that go on the gas cans in that pile of bags. I will see if I can find a reference photo if you need it.

This will be an interesting build to follow. Lots of different stuff.

 

[lupanzer]

Amazing...thanks for posting!

Luiz.

 

[Old Dog]

Ahh yes, thanks Paul, I just missed that, thanks !

 

[chukw]

An epic entry! I love 1/48 vehicles, and you have a great lineup going. I love Black Dog's crazy stowage sets as well, but the jerrycan handles are often broken even in 1/35. A little plastic rod or stretched sprue and you're good to go. I've gotten spares of these tricky little devils on occaision as well. I look forward to reading along as things commence!

 

[moon puppy]

Diggin' it already Gary.

 

[SA Dave]

I know Tamiya has Jerry can set in 1/48 You might get a set and use theyr handles.

 

[Duke Maddog]

This is going to be fun to watch, even though it's bigger than my usual scale.

Some suggestions for painting schemes:

Radio truck: Dunklegelb base with green splotches.
Cargo trucks: Dunklegelb basecoat, possibly with camouflage squiggles.
Ambulance: Dunklegelb cab with white on the body cabin.

Can't wait to see more.

 

[Sherman 18]

Did I see that right - five at once? :woohoo:

 

[Old Dog]

Yep, five, but they are small :yipee

Just some food for thought while I get organized for this, here are some photos I found on line...

I found more photos of the ambulance version than any of the others...

The next one has a pretty interesting three color scheme with mottling on the lightcolor. That could be a challenge ! It also looks like they used their compact spare on that rear wheel :laugh:

The low bed truck, the one with the square cab appears to have duals in the back, could do that as I wll have extra wheels. The other has the rounded cab and funky looking balloon tires

The only ones I could find of the radio truck, looks like the same one from both sides. One would think a radio truck would be festooned with antennas but apparently everything was stowed inside. It also has a different tire on one wheel.

The only one of the high bed truck I found was this one modified to run on rails, a good candidate for another campaign !

I found bunches of the standard vehicle and the command wagon so I didn't post those, mostly interested in the four with alternate bodies. If anyone has some to add, please feel free to do so.

 

[Old Dog]

OK, time to get cracking but first I had a request via PM to show how I intend to keep 5 kits organized during the build. Well I have lots of what I call project boxes, all sizes and shapes that I have picked up over the years, many are plastic boxes with lids intended for storing shoes and some are considerably larger with hinged lids but for this project I didn't need anything very big so I grabbed something from the pantry...

The boxes the conversions came in were an unhandy flap open box and the worst thing was the photo of the finished model was on the bottom making using it as a storage box a pita.

The containers are more than adequately sized for this project and I cut the photo out of the box and taped it to the lid to identify the contents.

Although I probably didn't need one for the standard body kit the Blackdog box was one of those annoying end flap boxes so I went ahead and set up one for it as well. So here is everything all ready to start the build.

I really don't need to organize the base kit parts as they are all the same and interchangeable.

The first thing and probably the most tedious part of building resin kits is removing the casting blocks and cleaning up the resin parts. I started with the most complex set, the radio truck, complex because it actually has a fairly complete interior as opposed to the ambulance that is mostly an empty body. It took a couple of hours but I have all the resin parts pretty much ready for assembly. Some of them were fairly easy to do requiring only scribing along the casting block and snapping it off, others required sawing. Some of the edges may need to be cleaned up a bit more at assembly but I would rather take off too little than too much at this stage. You may also notice I didn't remove the flashing on the side door opening. There is very little resin at the top of this opening and I was afraid it might not stand the assembly process without breaking. I'll wait till the side has been joined to the top they remove it.

I also removed all of the kit parts that will be used which is all of sprue A except for the driver. The only parts that may be used from sprue B will be the rear view mirror, pioneer tools and jack.

I'm not sure if I'll start assembling this one now or plug through the clean up of the other kits first. The resin parts will need to be cleaned well first to remove any release agent before painting and when I checked today I had no German field gray or panzer gray or what ever they call it so a trip to the local hobby shop is on the agenda for Saturday. Stayed tuned for the next exciting post

 

[SA Dave]

Thanks for that Hmmm picture on the box sounds li8ke an great idea :hmmm

 

[sharkman]

Wow, this looks like a great project Gary!

So many different variations and very well organized too!