Update on my build: the cab and load.
To build the cab as assemblies for painting, I decided to leave the cab roof part separate for now. But there isn’t much positive locating with the floor, so I had to add some plastic strips at the front and rear to make mountings for later assembly.
I wanted to show off the details in the cab as well as the engine, so opted to open the doors and hood. I used thin brass rod in the doors and hood, with holes in the cab to receive them, to allow me to add the doors/hood after everything is painted. I also added a strut from the firewall to the hood, based on what I could see in tech manuals and photos.
I carefully scraped the back of the brushguards to try to thin the bars since the real thing used narrow metal rods. In hindsight I should have just cut the bars and replaced them with plastic rod…
And there is no firm “tab & slot” alignment for the whole cab, so I added a peg in the frame on each side under the seat, with holes in the floor. It’s best to hold the floor in place and drill down to make sure the holes all line up, but of course I’d already glued in the seats by then! D’oh! - as Homer would say. Once I had the pegs installed I also masked the tops of the frame and underside of the cab to keep paint off where the glue will go later.
The fuel tanks have a problem with the manhole on top - HobbyBoss made them round when the tech manual shows them as oval. Round ones could be a second legitimate type, but I chose to reshape mine to make them oval. It meant thinning the front and rear edges of the raised lip, which is a challenging bit of careful scraping.
Again, HB offer no locating tabs, so to make it easier to mount after painting I drilled through the central bed frames into the tops of the truck frame and added plastic-rod pegs. Then I added some plastic scraps at each end to butt against the end frames.
The final task was to make a fuel-dispensing nozzle that matches the tech manual pictures. I used a bit of scrap sprue and some Evergreen rod to do it. (HB offers a strange post-war twin-tap affair that is not correct for a wartime truck.)
I replaced the oversized HB 5-gallon cans with some Italeri cans from the spares box.
I started painting the assemblies and cleverly wanted to add the stars from a set of Eduard masks, but following the instructions to add a sheet of paper meant I couldn’t see exactly where my mask was going! The doors came out OK, but the roof star was too far forward and needed to be redone. Worse still, the mask edges were trying to lift off, allowing too much overspray. Worse still, as I wrestled with removing the stencil my thumb left its mark. I’ve since sanded off the first star and repainted the OD - a new attempt at a star will wait until the paint has had a few days to harden again! The failed first attempt looked like this:
More to come…