Moon Bug part 7 - Completed.

 Its been 5 months since the last post on the Moon bug and I have not been able to do any modeling for some time but I have finally managed to finish the Moon Bug project.

Last time the model was at the primer stage, so the first job was to devise a paint scheme. As is my process these days I took a grey primer photo into photoshop and fiddled about until I came up with something I liked.As the vehicle has a whimsical comic book outline I wanted to do a colorful paint job to go with it. This is what I came up with.

 I then decided to design up and make some decals to add to the graphic nature of the finish. These i designed in Inkscape which is a free open source vector graphic editing program. I have always liked the graphic elements that Chriss Foss would apply to his gouache painted spacecraft book covers of the 1970s'. Referring to my Chriss Foss art book I availed myself of some of his genius and some of the decals do bear a very strong resemblance to his work. Here is the decal sheet.

One of the problems with DIY decals is that inkjet printers can't print white so if you want white in your decal you have to use white decal paper. That then means the carrier is white and you have to carefully cut around each decal to remove the extraneous white around the edges. Of course you can use clear decal paper which means you don't have to be as precise when cutting out the decal as the borders will be clear and will not be visible once applied but any white areas on your design will come out clear. If it is a big decal you can paint a white area where you want the white bit to be but for small decals I think it would be too hard to get the white painted areas that accurate.

I printed onto white decal paper and once cutting out the decals and applying them with much setting solution found that little white edges showed up which wasn't exactly what I wanted. I have since found some online tips for using white decal paper, where the edges of the decal should be coloured with a permanent marker to get rid of any white bleed once applied. Too late for me but a good idea for any future project that needs custom decals.

Paint was car paint from touch up spray cans with varying shades mixed up once decanted into airbrush jars and airbrushed on. Weathering was my usual method of a wash of Tamiya flat back diluted in much methylated spirits, wiped off with a metho soaked rag in the direction of the required streaks and drybrushing with white students acrylic. I then also added some oil paint colour modulation and a dirty brown pin wash.

One of the things I tried out on this model was painted panels lined out with a fine permanent marker pen. Models from Terrahawks recently came up for auction with accompanying photos and they had a surface that used a similar technique to very good effect. 

Photographically it seems to work just fine but in person, to the naked eye the conceit is all too obvious. My conclusion is that I prefer to have panels that are in the very least scribed into the surface if not actually separate from the underlying surface and glued on individually. I prefer the way light hits an actual edge with both a highlight on one side and a shadow on the other.

One thing I added to the model was a couple of dummy whip aerials on the top blisters at the rear. They are made from bicycle gear cable with a couple of plastic kits parts for a mount and a termination at the top. They should wave about fairly realistically when the vehicle is in motion.

I also swapped out the Kyosho springs on the shocks for some much stiffer Arrma springs part number AR330417. These are extremely stiff, fit the Mad Crusher shocks and have no trouble holding up the heavy body. If anything they are a little too stiff at 317gf/mm (17.75lb/inch or 3.109 N/mm) or but so far I haven't found any other springs the right length (75mm) and diameter (ID16mm) with a slightly less stiffness rating. The springs came with a chrome finish so I sprayed them matte black to make them a little less obvious.

Finally here is the finished model.

The next project up for completion is going to be a spaceship. In fact it will be one I started way back in 2013 and haven't touched since. Here is the first part of the project from 2013 - New Spaceship Model part 1.

In fact I need to come up with a better name for this spaceship as New Spaceship Model is pretty lame and considering it was started in 2013 it isn't all that new any more. If you have any suggestions for a decent name for the project please leave a comment.

Thanks for looking...

More soon...

Moon Bug part 6

 Got some primer on the Moon Bug.

I definitely need stiffer springs and more than likely sway bars on the chassis to hold up this heavy body.

The next step is to paint the figures and install them in the cabin and also come up with a suitable paint scheme.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...

Toy Bash Truck part 2

Part1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5


I finally completed constructing the chassis.The creeper chassis plates have been extended by some aluminium angle and channel section. The plates are held apart by some 6mm and 8mm aluminium rod spacers that have been drilled on the mini lathe and threaded at both ends to accept M3 cap screws.

The shocks have been mounted to the link mounting points on the axles with the links moved inboard. A piece of silicon fuel tubing has been inserted as a flexible bush into the hole in the shock shaft to allow some angular movement.

The top of the shocks use the mounting system that is included with the Hot racing shocks. These include a couple of silicon O rings and an aluminium ball shaped insert to allow for angular movement.

A styrene tray was made by heating some styrene with a hot air gun at specific points and bending it onto a wooden form one bend at a time. The trick is to shield the parts that need to remain flat so that only the plastic at the bend area gets heated. It is secured to the frame with some philips headed plastic screws salvaged from some old toy or appliance dis-assembly. The battery, speed controller and receiver are held on with self adhesive velcro. The battery is further sandwiched by some yellow EVA foam cut from a child's learn to swim surfboard.

The speed controller is a Castle Sidewinder 3 which can control both brushless and in this case a brushed motor using two of the 3 connectors. It can also be programmed through a Castle link and USB cable from your computer. It is set to crawler mode which gives a no delay reverse which I like as well as a drag brake at idle. The rear steering servo connects to a Hobby King servo reverser then to a Y connector with the front steering servo giving 4 wheel steering. Due to the 4 wheel steering it has a very small turning circle and is very maneuverable.

Unfortunately as expected the top heavy body tends to flop over to one side or another as can be seen below.

A solution to fix this was to attempt to make a sway bar. After some fiddling about this was made from some 2.5mm piano wire and a couple of small brass plates. Only the rear had enough room to fit this as the motor gets in the way at the front.This turned out to be entirely successful at curing the flop. A small DuBro collar secures the ends of the sway bar into the original shock positions on the axle. The piano wire is pretty old as can be seen by the surface rust, it'll need cleaning and possibly some paint. The hole that the sway bar pivots in has to be slightly bigger, preferably elongated into a slot to allow for the fact that the pivot position does not match the apparent pivot of the 4 link suspension. Its needs some play to compensate.

Here you can see the result of adding the sway bar with a nice level body.

I think the body probably sits a bit too high overall, but there's not a lot I can do about that at this point. I am going to add a bunch of tanks hanging down at the sides which may cure that perception. There is still some more volume to add to the body work at the front so that will help as well.

I completed the detailing of the top and nearly finished the rear.

The yellow part of the rear platform was originally from the top of the cabin of the dozer. The dark grey checker plate floor was from one of the rubbish trucks. The two black shapes that say Dick Smith upside down on them are the servo cases of my very first radio control unit from about 1980. They've sat in a box for nearly 35 years waiting for the right spot to glue them. Got a small amount to add to the back and then finish the front before the grey primer to see how its all looking.

The chassis also needs some paint. The worst part about that is having to dis-assemble and then re-assemble everything over again.

More soon...

Creeper 6X6 part 2 chassis

Creeper 6X6 part 1 is here

The original post for this from 2011 got accidentally deleted while I was trying to add a link to the next part, so I am going to recreate it here for a part 2.

Here is the Venom Creeper as it is supposed to be, a rock crawling RC vehicle supposedly to compete with the Axial  Rock crawlers. It was not as successful and has since been discontinued and for a little while back in 2011 they could be had new quite cheaply. I got a couple of the kits thinking I could attempt to make a 6X6 chassis. Others had already done this reasonably successfully so I had a go. One thing I particularly liked was the anodised aluminium beadlock rings which are very sci fi in design. The other aspect to the Creeper axles that i liked is they have a switchable diff lock, which means you can either have a working diff for tight cornering or a locked diff for better traction on rough terrain. As I have little regard to the "crawling performance" of these vehicles I thought they would suit my application just fine.

 I started by designing the chassis framework on a CAD program Deltacad.

This design was then printed out onto paper twice and spray glued to some 1.6mm thick lengths of aluminium angle. All the radiuses were then drilled out, after center popping them, using the radius centers marked on the printout. Then using a scroll saw and a lot of blades really designed for wood I cut out the rest of the material that made up the holes in the truss structure. Much careful filing later I had a pair of frames that the rest of the venom assemblies could bolt to.

 What you see here in these pictures is circa 2011. I eventually swapped out the shocks and their mounting positions many times over until I had a suspension system that could hold the weight of the top heavy body without flopping to the side. The added on rear axle is connected to a creeper frame cut in half, with many spacers made from 6mm aluminium rod on my Unimat 3 lathe.

It was quite a fiddle to get it all to work without binding or fouling, especially the front wheels which are turned for steering.

More recently with the new stiffer shock setup there is not the same amount of articulation as shown in the previous photos.

I then turned my attention to the body design and did a number of rough thumbnail sketches. After choosing the one i liked ( at the time, but ultimately abandoned and replaced) I roughly modeled it in Maya to get a sense of the volumes and proportions.

I then built a wood and plywood frame as a basis to start hacking into some 2mm styrene.
However I didn't really like what I had done and it sat around till this year 2015 when I did another thumbnail sketch that got me enthused and cutting plastic.


more soon...