Creeper 6x6 part 5

The last time I posted about this project was in 2017.  

With the Science Vessel project nearing completion I was thinking about which project to work on next. I thought it was high time this project was brought to completion.  

This RC vehicle project has been through a number of design revisions over its life with the current design being the third (and final) body with two previous designs having been started to be built and then rejected.

Link to the part 4 post.

In the last post I mentioned I was making a wooden buck to form a perspex window over for the front of the vehicle. That was done not long after the 2017 post and the project has sat around dormant since then.

Below you can see the wooden buck I made to heat bend the perspex windscreen. The buck and the perspex piece is made over size to be trimmed back to fit after bending. The trick to heat bending perspex neatly is to only heat the area to be bent. I use bits of thin sheet metal and you could use aluminium foil to mask the hot air from the heat gun off the bits I am keeping flat.

The first process was to apply the gentle curve to the front face of the window area. I heated the whole section masking off the sides until it was just slightly soft and used a cotton rag to press it down onto the former. Once cooled I used the sheet metal masking to just reveal a roughly 6mm wide strip for the corner bend. That exposed strip was heated and then bent using a flat piece of wood to push the perspex against the side of the former. This was then repeated for the other side. Once cooled it was trimmed to fit the front of the model and 2mm styrene pieces added. The picture below shows the result. The perspex protective film which was a plastic film was still on the undersurface. If the perspex had a paper protective layer I would have removed it first as it does not stretch like the plastic film does.

There is not much left to do to it other than wire up and install all the various light systems and complete all the surface paneling, and paint it  and the figures etc etc. Actually it seems there is still a fair bit to do and it always takes longer than I estimate.

In an attempt to lighten the very heavy body I hacked away at most of the interior bulkheads made from 6mm foamed PVC. This actually did result in a reasonable weight saving.

When I made the chassis originally I had provided a 6v power supply for any future lighting but as I now prefer to run all the lighting at 12 volts I replaced the 6 volt UBEC with a Matek booster board which has an adjustable output voltage. It takes  a feed from the 7.2 volt LIPO battery for the vehicles brushed motor and ESC and boosts it to an adjustable voltage in this case adjusted to 12 volts. In order to get a higher voltage than the source you must sacrifice some current but as I am only powering some LEDs which only use a small amount of current there is no problem.

 The 12 volts from the Booster Board then goes through a Pololu switch that plugs into the third channel of the receiver to remotely switch the lighting on and off via the push button on the transmitter.

In the photo above you can also see the sway bar arm on the middle axle. It is made from a length of solid brass on each side attached to the axle with a short linkage made from Traxxas rod ends. The bars at the other end are attached using a cap screw clamp to a length of piano wire with a flat ground on each end. A small aluminium spacer spaces the bar out from the chassis plates.

 

The control console is made from a 1/35 tank hull part with a perspex screen covered in a piece of black 0.5mm styrene with two video screen holes cut into it as well as a series of 1mm holes to look like buttons or indicator lights. Buried inside are 4 bright white leds in series, each dropping 3 volts making 12 volts in total. The occupants of the cabin are a couple of Bruder 1/16 scale figures.

 

 The photo below with a view down through the removable access hatch in the cabin roof shows the console in position.

All the lighting in the following photos are coming from the LEDS inside the console. The glowing edge is the raw edge of the perspex screen. I kinda like its effect so I may not paint over it.
 

I had an idea to make some sort of glowing revolving tech in a circular area on top of the roof that was yet to be detailed. I had  a bunch of cheap LED linear sequencing kits from another project and thought I might be able to adapt one to make leds sequence in a circle making a sort of rotating effect. The leds are white but there are some portholes painted with Tamiya clear blue which I added to the  the Pilgrim Explorer kit part I used which happily matches the diameter of the existing round shape on the roof.

 

The snag with this system is that it runs on 5 volts and not the 12volts I have for the rest of the lighting. I may have to re-employ that UBEC switched to 5v to power this device or use another board to drop the 12 volts down to 5 on the body. That may not be the most efficient way to do it, I'll have to experiment to see if that will work.

You can see the rotating effect in the short video below.

 I also made a communications array from some kit parts. The horizontal scanner is a part I was given some years ago. I think it is probably a Millennium Falcon engine part from one of those tiny Bandai kits. It also has the end of a disposable razor, a component I like to add to model somewhere, if at all possible.

 

The next task is to add some rear lights and then to complete paneling the surface.

Thanks for looking. 

More soon...

Moon Bug part 4

I have been building a rear door and finishing up the external detailing on the Moon Bug project as well as starting the interior of the cabin.

Rear Door.

Right side.

Left side.

The picture above shows the louvre arrangement of the roof over the rear door.

I also added a second smaller grey blister to each side. 

These blisters are made from plastic measuring spoons with the handle sawed off. The nub of the handle was then sanded back to the contour matching the oval shape.

Some detailing has been added to the underneath of the hull front where it meets the chassis. I also added a few bits of detail underneath along the sides to fill in some gaps that could be seen through the chassis. I have some small tanks (not shown) made from PVC pipe end caps which will be affixed to the chassis after they are painted.

The cabin interior still needs some control consoles to be made up with some backlit screens and some arm rests for the seats.

The Bruder figures seem happy with their new seats. The padding for the seats is made up from half round ABS strips.

 

Through the door in the middle and down two steps is a back wall that will look like a transverse corridor to the interior of the vehicle. The back wall has been detailed with a recessed section. There is some 12 volt strip lighting in this corridor which hopefully will be brighter than the cabin interior which I plan to light just from the as yet unmade console screens.

I have also made some detailed inserts for the cockpit sides with kit parts mostly from the Tamiya 88mm Flak kit.. 

I am a bit concerned that perhaps the detail is a little too fine scaled for the vehicle and looks out of place compared to the rather chunky detailing elsewhere.

I will reserve judgement for now and wait till some primer goes on to see if some alternative inserts need making.

This model is getting close to completion of the build phase with a bit of piping to do, the cabin sides to think about and the consoles to sort out.

 

 Thanks for looking.

More soon...

Moon Bus part 9 completed.

I had a bit of a disaster in the painting process which is something I always dread.
The big problem was the paint, top coat and primer just came straight off the black styrene as soon as any masking tape even low-tack got anywhere near it. It flaked off in sheets. It was very depressing.

 

It all had to be scraped off where the masking was eventually going to be placed, to be re-primed and top coated.  Strangely the dodgy primer stuck much better to the parts made from white styrene like the evergreen textured sheet, though small bits were still pulled off with any masking tape application. In these areas I did what I usually do and applied some hair dryer heat to the masking tape as I removed it which aids in softening the gum and preventing small chips coming off.

I did a bit of research to try and figure out why this occurred as it has happened to me randomly in the past. Sometimes the primer is absolutely perfectly fine and very occasionally I find it comes away with the masking. I found a very useful bit of information on you tube about the types of primer I usually use, namely car primer in an aerosol can.

Turns out there are two types available to me locally one good and one bad and I had three cans with both types represented. I sprayed the three different cans I had in sections over some black styrene and after it had dried applied some masking tape. Pulling the masking tape away was extremely revealing. The primer I had used came completely off and the other two had remained intact. The picture below shows the three cans I tested.

 The can on the left was the one I used on this model which failed miserably. The other two behaved as one would hope, they stayed on the surface. It turns out the cans that say Multi Surface work very well on plastic, they even state they work on fibreglass on the back. The one that is labelled acrylic primer appears to be absolutely useless on plastic and therefore I will not use it ever again.

Before this all happened I had decided on a predominantly white finish with some sort of red stripes to match the red on the chassis. Below is the model with the base colour applied which I took into photoshop and tried out a number of various versions of red accents finally deciding on the colour rough shown in the second picture which helped to highlight the shape left between the panels that flow around the windows.

This red motif was then masked up extremely gingerly and sprayed with a small can of Ford Blaze red. The white was actually a warm off white called Antarctic white. Once that was done I re-evaluated the front end and decided that maybe the front panel needed some colour as well. So back to photoshop just to check and the colour rough that resulted shown in the second photo below was more to my liking.

My old weathering technique using a mix of Tamiya flat black and ethanol ( methylated spirits) as a dirty wash was employed. The surface is then cleaned off using a rag damp with ethanol leaving the grunge in the crevices. Dry brushing with a light grey students acrylic followed. Detailed scrapes were painted with acrylic hobby paints, a light grey surround with a dark grey core.

Another of the painting tasks was to paint the occupant figures, something I am pretty terrible at. In an attempt to try and improve in this area I watched a lot of You tube videos on figure painting in acrylics. Below is the result, still pretty poor but a lot better than my previous attempts.

The figures were superglued into their seats and the front panel screwed into position. To hide the screw heads I found a piece of red self adhesive vinyl and punched out some small circles that were pretty much the same diameter as the screw holes. The colour is not an exact match but I think it will do the job. I also used a few pieces of the red vinyl in other places on the model.

The solar panel cells on top were picked out with random squares in three shades of grey.

Finally here is the completed model.

  

Part 1 of this project was way back in October 2014. Part 2, 3 and 4 was a year later in October 2015. Then nothing until 2020. This project has been spread over nearly 6 years so it is satisfying to finally bring it to completion. It's also the third completed model for 2020 which as we all know has been and continues to be a very unusual and challenging year.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...