Bogger 6x6 part 2

Trawling through my stash for suitable parts I dug out a bulldozer blade from a Bruder toy. I removed the front part of the blade and thought the back part would be good for the rear of the chassis. It needed a  section to be removed from the middle to fit. The two abs halves had all the holes filled with scrap sheet abs and some strips to reinforce the join.

 

 This was superglued to the black foamed PVC chassis . While at the rear end I decided to add some chunky detail to the body.

Two tanks were made from PVC pipe caps with a clear centre box from a broken coffee machine. The teal pipes are from a toy that I discovered on a Jason Jensen Trains sci-fi modeling you tube video. Either side are some reels from an old VHS video tape. There is a further layer of finer detailing to go yet.

Moving round the front I made a couple of transitional boxes from styrene sheet. I also made the base for a communications dish.

Next I thought about an entry door. I have a few round surrounds from battery lights I thought might work as I have used these before. I used an online calculator to print out a template to cut out a fishmouth shape from 1mm styrene sheet to mate with the curve of the hull in the same way as on the Moon Bus project.

After thinking about how much space a sliding door would require I decided to split this housing and widen it into an oval shape. I then drew up a door design in CAD and printed it out fullsize on paper. This was then stuck onto two layers of 2mm styrene stuck together with double sided tape. I could then cut out two doors at once.

Pilot holes were drilled at the radius centres of all the corners and then drilled out to 8mm with a step drill.

Then using a scroll saw all the little segments were cut out. Careful sanding and filing follows to clean up all the edges and then these filigreed panels are stuck to a backing panel of styrene. 

Surround panels were made with some evergreen strips to provide some thickness with the door behind. 

These are then glued into the previously split surrounds with more styrene to fill in the missing parts of the door surround. A sheet of wet and dry sand paper is taped to the hull and a final sanding to match the hull shape is done before super gluing the door assemblies to the hull. Any gaps are dealt with with baking soda and thin super glue.

An exhaust vent has also been added made from an angled hair cutting comb with a styrene duct.

Detailing has also started on the top surface. I found a couple of plastic rulers and glued them on as well as a dome shaped lens cover from a video projector. The grey parts are from a 1/35 scale German railway gun kit.

 I also added a couple of rabbit ear antennas I had made for a previous project but did not end up using. They are on a sprung pivot so they will hopefully bounce back and forward when traveling. The spring system was taken from the switch of rubbish truck toys.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...