37 Ford Pickup--Fun with "Super Sculpey"

In my research to learn more about the wonderful paints made by Jacquard I found that there is a huge internet culture centered around this stuff called "polymer clay". Apparently artists who buy Jacquard products use it to paint their polymer clay creations.

I haven't read a lot about integrating Sculpey into model car making, but based on how easy it sounded to use, I figure it's being done, and I thought I'd give it a shot.

There are lots of manufacturers out there making polymer clay, but a leader of this burgeoning industry seems to be the folks who make something called "Super Sculpey". That's the product name I kept coming across over and over from people who make jewelry, dance figurines, movie models, military figures and the like.

I bought a hunk from the Polymer Clay Superstore (I liked the name). Super Sculpey comes in a pretty big hunk. Apparently (so far for me anyway) you can store it at room temperature and it won't dry out. It "fires" at 275 degrees, so you don't need a 1500 degree or whatever kiln. It's non toxic (I didn't detect any bad smell or nastiness while working with it, but I wouldn't eat it). But what really caught my eye is that you can sand and drill the stuff--even thin sheets--without it cracking or splitting. Now, that sounds like something I can use.



My first creation was a racing seat. It was really pretty easy to make, and I have no experience with sculpture of any kind. And sure enough I could sand and file it and it held up just fine. What you see here is unpainted but otherwise ready to go. I primed it with Duplicolor primer/sealer and the primer sealed the clay right up; the instructions that came with the clay said to use acrylic hobby paint and I guess the Duplicolor was close enough.

The real problems began when I realized I had to make things bilaterally symmetrical, or at make a mirror image of one object from the other. So for instance I tried to make another "mirror image" of the seat you see here so I could use them side by side. Guess what--it was impossible, for me anyway, with my non-existent sculpting skills.

I guess I could make guides, as the car designers do when creating "old school" mockups of car bodies using clay. Then use these guides to make sure the "sister seat" was a close mirror match to the original. But it seems that would be pretty tricky on such a small scale. So for now this seat is a one of a kind. It could be cast, I guess, but that doesn't help with "mirror image" creations which is something you frequently find on a car.





I did end up making a bolster of sorts for the 37 pickup, and no, it's not bilaterally symmetrical, but it's good enough (I figure no one will be able to notice the seat is about 2 scale inches higher on the passenger side; heck, no one every really looks inside my models at their interiors anyway.) It came out OK, and would have been a whole lot of work to make out of a plastic sheet or brass.

I think polymer clay is really interesting stuff, and I can see why there is a giant Internet culture of artists and hobbyists who go gaa-gaa over the stuff. Sculpey has all sorts of other interesting products, including an interesting looking mold system Now, there has to be a use for that somewhere in the model car world.

37 Ford Pickup: Vette Engine

One of the many things I'm not very good at is building engines so for this project I thought I'd try to learn how to be a bit better.






The engine is out of a 1:24 Revell Kit--57 Vette Basic Builder. I originally wanted to build the "Fuelie" version of the engine but found the detail and casting on the air cleaner to be sufficiently bad to make me think again--doing a really knock-up job would have been a lot of work. Just modifying the air cleaner portion to look good would have been a lot of work. So I ditched it and used the dual-carb setup that's an option for the engine.

First thing I did was buy and use black "The Detailer". The idea was to wash some black into things like the valve covers and intake manifold to add realism. I have tried mixing my own washes but this stuff is a lot better. Dropping a bit of that on the nicely cast screen on the top of the stacks came out really well and was easy. I treated the value covers and manifold to some "detailer" as well and they too came out looking pretty good.




The real hassle was the spark plug wires and distributer. This is something I always really struggle with and my spark plug wiring never looks very real or very good. This time I got some "PlastiDip" to do the "boots" on the plugs. This is a sort of plastic sheep-dip type spoo that comes in a big can that looks like it held Pringles chips at some point and now found its real purpose in life--a big old Pringles can full of industrial waste.

Seriously, what I found out is that Plastidip is really thick and gooey and nasty but makes a great sort of thick glue/black slop that seems useful for a lot of things (just don't SPILL the stuff!). Not only did it make OK (not great, but OK) boots, but, it served as the glue that held the wiring to the distributor. I don't think the distributor (scratch built), the wiring harnesses (photoetch) the plug wires (wire wrap wire) or the boots (Plastidip) came out perfectly but they are a heck of a lot better than I usually do, I owe this to just using better materials and being more patient at this stage of the build.




While we're on the subject of patience--I am always on the lookout for better "metalizers" than the Alclad II I usually use. It just takes a lot of time to prime the part, spray on the black enamel, fire up the airbrush, and finally squirt on some Alclad. For this build I am checking out Krylon's Foil paints, which I bought at my local hardware store. They weren't cheap--$5 a can--but they went on OK. The gold looks more "metallic" than the silver; the silver might pass for aluminum if you're not too picky. Overall I liked the gold OK, and it might make a good undercoat, along with some pearl flakes, for a candy finish someday.

37 Ford Pickup--Son of Kit Bash

After thinking about the 29 Ford project I decided that I probably need to spend more time on each project instead of rushing through. So we are back to the same question: what is it that one tries to get out of a hobby? I think in my case, it's just to keep my hands moving so I don't go crazy. But I also want to make sure at the end of the day that I've made whatever I'm doing as good as I can....it's just my upbringing I guess.



For me, buying the kits is the easiest part. It's a cheap hobby compared to some others! For this build up I'm using four kits, mostly, and I think I paid around $60 for the four--I traded some parts for the Vette kit--that's about what my wife paid for a pair of sailing gloves the other day!!! And Ebay/Internet etc. makes it even easier--heck, I don't even have to get in my car anymore to buy anything.

OK about the kits. The 37 pickup is Revell Monogram 85-7627. It's a stock kit, not a 2 in 1 or whatever, so don't expect to find Cragers or chome headers in the kit! The 40 Ford is Monogram 2720. It's 1:24 scale, and I usually stay away from 1:24 because it seems a bit big, but I liked the box art, so there you go. BTW the flathead in the 40 pickup kit is pretty crummy--it has molded on headers for instance and doesn't look very accurate to me. The Vette I got in trade for some Enamel paints. It's Revell 85-0852. Nice kit, but I am not sure how "basic" it is--I wouldn't want to try to tackle this kit as one of my first modelling attempts. Finally the 51 Fleetwood is AMT-Ertl 38274. It's been reissued a bunch of times I believe; I bought this for a chopped 51 Chevy that's been on hold for about a year now.




All you see was done in a few hours. I may not be getting better at building kit bash rods, but I am getting faster! I am planning on using the stock Vette engine--it's not quite in scale but I figure I can get away with it. The body, radiator shell, and pickup bed are all from the 37 kit. The cab should probably be chopped but I am not sure; I keep going back and forth on whether it will look better chopped or not--I usually don't like chopped pickups. The bed was cut up to be shorter--I liked it better that way. The frame and suspensions are from the 40 Ford, and the brake drums are from the 51 Chevy. I don't know where the tires came from--they look AMTish to me--but they were sitting on my bench for about a month and I was too lazy to put them in my big tupperware box-full-o-tires so I used them here. I was going to use the Vette skinnies--which are cool looking wheels/tires, but skinnies end up looking wimpy on this build.



Since the body is heavily channeled I had to chop up the interior. The upper half is from the 37 Ford, while the floorboard is cut out of the '40 pickup and glued to the top. The seat of the 37 becomes part of the floorboard now--a bit slimey but it works--it needs a lot of finishing off, but at this stage I am only mocking up the basics.



The frame was Z'd by cutting the back off, putting some V shaped sprue in, and gluing it back up. I didn't superglue this as I knew was going to have to some moving around of parts while it was setting. I used Tenax 7-R instead, which I am liking more and more as I use it more and more--it's a bit more forgiving than CA glue but dries about as tough. Even though this was a really fast Z job, it came out pretty well.



The firewall was measured and chopped with a saw and then finished up (well, it still has a way to go, really) with a Dremel tool with a 200 grit sanding bit. So this time I am going to try to finesse each part of the build a bit more and have more fun with the paint. There is no reason to rush things that I can think of.

GS-Hypo Cement--Useful but not Foolproof

This has been a tough week. A combination with increasing dissatisfaction with the kitbash 29 Ford has crept in and I'm not sure why. I know I don't have time to spend endless hours on a hobby that I'm pursuing to take my mind off of other things. And yet if it's so casual why am I taking the time to write a blog about it? I must be more serious about this hobby then I'd like to admit....I will have to spend more time pondering this.

So onto this week's post. I have recently started using G-S Hypocement for any sort of "mission critical" finish or chrome gluing. Before I was trying to use clear enamel or superglue. I found G-S Hypo Cement on Micromark's site and decided to give it a try, and, after messing around with it a bit I came to the conclusion: this stuff works quite well.

But it's not foolproof. The directions advertise that you can "remove excess cement with alcohol". Well that sounds like a winner--try doing that with CA glue or Testor's stinky red. It won't work.

Glue that sticks stuff together but can be debonded with alcohol sounded too good to be true so I decided as usual to run some tests. First test was to put a big blob on an unused piece of plastic "glass" I had lying around. I have found neatly gluing glass to be one of the toughest and most frustrating things in this odd hobby, so if G-S helps with that I am all over it.

Well, if I used some alcohol right away (in the first few minutes after use) I could still see a faint trace of the glue left behind. Even if I put a bit on and immediately wiped it off with alcohol (I had a drenched qtip standing by) I could still see some "faint white dreck" on the glass. So at least for glass, G-S isn't foolproof--you have to treat it very carefully just like stinky red of CA glue--if you get it on the glass you're going to have to polish it out like other glues.

And if it drives at all you're really screwed! Alcohol will no longer remove it at all--not even a little bit--you end up with a huge white blob.

This is the same rear window after soaking in 70% isopropyl alcohol for 1 week. The GS stain simply would not come out. Soaking doesn't help!!!

Chrome is a bit different. The G-S glue dries very clear if you don't muck with it too much. So even if you can't get it off you might be OK. I put some on a left over chrome sprue and let it dry. To my surprise the glue on the "tube" section of the sprue came off easily--I could rub it off with my thumb, and it left the chrome below in good shape. I c0uld not get it off the flat stuff though. It seems that if the chrome is a bit porous the stuff sticks. In this case there were some slight notches in the flat part of the sprue. However, for assembly chrome with G-S I am still going to scrape off the chrome where the glue is going to be applied if possible.

So here's the good news. This glue really helps. I am not the tidiest guy around and in assembling this chrome hot rod frame I did my usual blobs here and there (it's from an AMT parts pack and was not easy to assemble--lots of parts didn't fit and required trimming and bending).



This would have been a huge mess if I couldn't use alcohol to clean up the G-S while it was still wet. As long as you work fairly fast, and keep in mind it doesn't stick too well to chrome, it's extremely useful stuff.

The Great Devcon Epoxy Experiment

I am not getting too much positive feedback about the 29 Ford Kitbash....perhaps I rushed through the build too fast and it shows too much. Oh well. I have to keep rethinking why it was I started up this hobby again. The primary goal is to find some relaxation, and I still feel that spending hours and hours and hours on a single part or assembly means I have become as obsessed about modeling as I have about other aspects of my life, and that would not be a good thing.

On to this post's main topic: Devcon Epoxy



As a modeler who is maybe in too much of a rush, I am looking for fast ways to glue things up. In my young years I used a lot of tubes of the "stinky red" Testors glue, which was pretty good on the sticky scale, but was stringy, left a big mess, and sometimes didn't get the job fully done. And it stank really, really bad.


Enter Epoxies. I was looking for something sticky (so when I placed a part it wouldn't immediately fall off). CA glue is good for some things, but, it's not sticky--it runs like water, for the most part. I was using Ace Hardware's Epoxy but it dried a bit yellow, and the tubes got nasty after a few uses, getting Epoxy goo all over my hands each time I used it. On a web modeler site I read about Devcon: easy to use and dries clear so I mail ordered some, and started using it about 2/3rds of the way through the 29 Ford project.

I am sold on this stuff. It indeed dries clear and fast. And a side discovery I made: For better or worse it does not stick to chrome.

In my rush to finish the 29 ford I deposited a big chunk on one of the valve covers, in my rush (and inexperience) to get the distributor wiring in. It really bugged me, and I thought about trying to cut off the valve cover and replace it with an unsoiled one from the parts box, but I CA glued the heck out of the part and it wasn't going to be easy to take off.

I took the blob in some tweazers, pulled, and to my amazement the entire chunk came off in a single piece--and the valve cover looked great!

But was this a fluke?



......so I got the chome block out the left-over Lindberg Auburn (the one I took the Duval-becomes-Hallock windshield out of) and purposefully globbed a bunch of Epoxy on the side.

I let it dry for about 4 hours and then using tweezers removed it:



Again the whole blob came up--it was easily removed, really, but some of the chrome came up with it. Too much that I could do this on something serious (even my version of serious, which is less serious than a lot of other's version of serious) so perhaps the ability to recover from bad Devcon mistakes is limited.

It does make me remember that I will always have to scrape the chrome where I glue, just as I do with stinky red. Overall I am adding Devcon to my bag of glues, and it may become the franchise player. I am about to do my first project with resin and I understand Epoxy is the glue of choice for that. We'll see how it goes.

Kitbashed 29 Ford Hot Rod--Finished, Well, Sort Of

Another couple of weeks gone, and I haven't had as much relaxation time as usual. But in spite of long work weeks and little time at the bench the 29 Ford hot rod kitbash is pretty much done; I should still add some details to the underside (it has no mufflers right now for instance) but I will probably leave that for a rainy day....it's nice weather out right now so I am not anxious to flip the model over and keep working.



Modeling is a constant struggle between finding time to get things right and substandard results because I couldn't find the time. The more time I take the better things come out. But there are of course only so many hours in the day.

So on this build I spent a fair amount of time "engineering" how all the parts were going to fit together, modifying the frame to accommodate the engine block/headers/valve covers (which came BTW from the 57 Chevy "Boyd Coddington" kit AMT/Ertl #38251), figuring out how to fit the tie rods onto the front axle, and so on. But not enough time on paint, which is usually my favorite part of a build.



Thus, I should have spent more time polishing then I did. I used Duplicolor rattle can forest green since I was in a rush, and Krylon Crystal clear as the clearcoat--didn't even use the airbrush. But there you go. I spent about 1 hour polishing with 2000 grit sandpaper and then Tamiya polish, and it shows. It looks like an old time lacquer job--shiny from a distance--and my wife--who BTW is truly an angel walking the earth--says she loves the color, and that's good enough.

One of the things I wanted to try to learn on this build was what role the primers made in the finished look. I am sorry to say I didn't spend enough time painting and sweating the finish to come to any real conclusions. I did use "Primer Filler" on the frame rails and didn't spend a whole evening sanding them down after Z-ing the frame; it was more of a quick twice over with a few sanding sticks, and the frame rails came out looking good (I used duplicolor Gloss black Acrylic Enamel for the frame, and it looks good and smooth). So perhaps the filler helped a bit.



The hardest thing about this project was (first) getting all the pieces to fit "straight" and (second) making the Duval windshield look decent. I have built jigs and bought 90 degree angle weights and grids to work on and everything else I have read about, to make things come out "straight" like the real car, and my cars still come out with things a bit off-kelter. In this case the rear of the body sits about 3 scale inches too high on one side, but the front is fine. I have no idea how this happened, but once I epoxied down the body there seemed to be no way to go back. So I don't have an answer to that yet.

The windshield was another thing I never fully sorted out for this build. But again it came out pretty well, in spite of some real struggle. The one from the 29 Ford donor kit (AMT #6572) didn't work at all--it was too "model T" looking and made the car look too high. I jettisoned that during the early planning stages. As I mentioned last time I ended up using the windshield out of a Lindberg 35 Auburn Speedster, #72324. IMO the Lindberg kit is pretty junky (I noticed there is a photo of a 1:1 Auburn on the box art, and not a photo of a master-modeler built rendition of the Lindberg kit--and that's never a good sign). One of my complaints is that the windshield is pretty out of scale--the real car didn't have a fence-post sized solid chrome metal strip along the top edge of the windshield glass, for instance. So, I ended up doing a lot of surgery on the windshield's frame, and used some PET plastic for the window glass instead of the clear plastic Lindberg provided(which looked way too thick to me). So now it's a Hallock and not a Duval. Oh well.

How to glue the PET onto the "Duval" (well, sort of) chrome frame was another matter. I had a tough time, in spite of using G-S Hypo cement (the end all uber-clear glue which you can get from Micromark). The merits and problems with G-S Hypo are a discussion of its own and will be the topic of a later post.



I was going to put a blower on the engine but it didn't look right, so I found a 6x2bbl carb setup from a really bad (bad chassis, flash and sag, bad tooling--really not a good kit at all) AMT 32 ford kit #38280 and used that. I just love 6 carb engines on 1:1 cars, but, man, I have a lot of trouble with building scale engines. They never come out looking very "straight" to me when build them, compared to photos of engines I see other modelers do that look, well, perfect. Maybe that's because I don't build them that often--I am the king of the curbside.

On this build, I had a really bad time with the distributor wires, so that's something I am going to work on more in the future. But I did discover "Devcon" 5 minute epoxy after reading about it on the scaleautomag.com forum; I was using Ace Hardware's Epoxy before, and Devcon's was lauded in the forum as a great improvement over generic 5 minute epoxy, and it is. Devcon is easier to mix and dries clearer, is sticky as anything and dries incredibly hard, so I am going to be using that from now on....And it appears to not stick to chrome, which saved my bacon on this engine...I had a big epoxy blob on one of the chrome valve covers (oops), but managed to pick the entire chunk off with some tweezers and left the underlying chrome intact! Lucky, and extremely satisfying!!!



As I said last time I morphed a 32 Ford dash into the 29 body for this project. I took it easy on this interior and used the tub that came with the 29 Ford AMT kit, with the steering wheel/steering column stolen out of the 32 Ford Revell Kit. The gauges are finished with a blob of Tamiya clear yellow. Overall I ended up using a lot of parts out of the Revell "Good Guys" 32 Ford kit #85-2024 which I recommend highly--beautifully tooled, lots of detailing parts, and a lot of fun both as a parts donor kit or if you want to build a "box stock" 32 Ford hot rod.

29 Ford Kitbash--Priming it up

Last week I was gathering up parts for a '29 Ford Hot Rod, with an emphasis on kitbashing rather than a lot of customizing and/or scratchbuilding. I have learned from previous mistakes (read: glue bombs) that a lot of test fitting and planning has to go into a kitbash.

This kitbash is going together smoothly so far, due to the fact that most parts from the 1929-1932 Ford Era are fairly interchangable. As far as "engineering" this the only hard thing I've tried (and it's not done yet) is to marry a windshield from a Lindberg Auburn kit to the 29 Model A body. For that my main concern was having no good way to glue on the windshield so I built up a "target" for it using styrene rod. We'll see if it works or not.



I am trying to learn about what sort of primer is right for what, so I went to the auto store and bought the three you see here. I have used the Duplicolor sandable primer many times and I like it; it covers evenly and dries very fast. I used the "filler" primer on the Z'd frame since I didn't spend days sanding the frame sides to look smooth--the idea being that it glops over any little cracks or dents that I didn't spend enough time sanding out. Let's see if it works as advertised.

The sealer--I am really not sure I needed that, but, I couldn't see how sealing the primer before painting was going to hurt any, so a coat went on the body and the radiator shell. I have seen the sandable primer show impressions of where the chassis was puttied, and I imagine this sealer stuff will cover over that, but we will see.





Hard to believe that a few evenings went into this, but, it did. Planning and test fitting is time consuming!! The radius arms and leaf spring for the front are the from a 37 Ford pickup kit (see last time for the main kits I "bashed" from). I cut open the radial arms at their apex and spread them out, which I have been told 1:1 hot rodders did this mod on many a Ford hot rod throughout the years.

I cut the interior tranny hump for the of an unknown 1:24 kit in the scrapbox and glued it in with gap closing CA. After drying (which was quick) I noticed that it didn't go in flat, and removing and repositioning it is now impossible. Oh well, it's not noticable when the interior is in the body shell, but, I have to remember to be careful when affixing things with CA, as, there is no going back--I tried using CA debonder for this a couple of builds ago and made a big melted mess out of the whole thing, so I am cautious about that now..

The dash came out of the Revell Good Guy's 32 ford kit but had to be pretty heavily altered to fit the 29 Model A interior. I also added some tabs using CA glue to make it so I have a way to glue it into the interior.

Now I have to figure out how I want to paint this. My gut feeling is to just use metalflake lacquer and be done with it--I have to start the "real" Model A hot rod project in about 3 weeks, so this one is just for fun before the really tough project begins, so I am not going to go crazy trying out yet another way to paint a body.