Project Heavy Haulage: Update 2

For Update 1, click here

Having got the Volvo’s chassis extended and painted, I decided to do some more work on the cab interior. I had been holding off from finally assembling the cab because I intended to add some extra details to bring life to the model, so this was my next focus.

Access to the internet and colour printers have made for some real advances in modelling. The internet is invaluable for research and for finding images of things you want to make, and with the aid of a colour printer, you can reproduce detail items in scale and add them to your models. This is what I did to add a lived-in look to the Volvo’s cab interior.

I thought about what a heavy haulage driver might have lying around in his cab, and came up with a shortlist: soft drinks, cigarette packs, soccer and truck magazines and a hi-visibility vest. I set to work finding colour images on the internet of those items, and having saved the images onto my PC’s hard drive, I then embedded the images into a Word document and using the built-in ruler and a calculator, reduced them in size to be 1/24 scale. When printed out, these were folded as necessary (the Pepsi label was wrapped around a plastic rod, cut to length) and added to the cab interior. I also printed out some soccer team pennants and a scarf and put them in the windscreen (I chose Beerschott, the Antwerp team, to fit the Belgian operator theme I had decided on for the truck). Once these bits and bobs were placed in the cab with PVA glue, I finally fixed the interior into the cab shell.

I needed to get on with the chassis detailing before I fitted the cab, so it was time to look at what parts still remained to be fitted: the main items were the diesel tank, exhaust system and battery box. Model truck diesel tanks are notoriously awkward to finish because they always seem to be moulded in two semi-circular halves, leaving an obvious join along the length. Also, they tend to be made of stainless steel, as are things like the battery box and exhaust expansion box. So, the first job was to assemble the two halves of the diesel tank: I used a little Squadron Green Putty to fill the seam, which was sanded and smoothed before painting with satin black paint. Why satin black? I’ll get to that in a moment. The battery box and exhaust box, already assembled and smoothed, had already been painted with the same grey paint as the chassis.

Stainless steel is very hard to replicate in model form, but there are a few products available which give a fairly realistic look. I decided to use Alclad Chrome , which is specially formulated for creating metal finishes on models. Alclad can only be applied with an airbrush, so I used my old Aztec A470 to apply a coat of Alclad onto the diesel tank, battery box, exhaust  and front wheel trims. Spraying Alclad onto gloss black gives the best possible shiny finish, but spraying it onto the satin black diesel tank gave a realistic dull metallic look. Applying it to the grey battery box and exhaust box gave a silvery aluminium finish, not quite what I wanted but still quite nice. The black plastic wheel trims turned out pretty shiny like stainless steel.

I had decided at the start of the project to add a crane to the Volvo, as often found on real heavy haulage trucks. The easiest way to get hold of a suitable crane was to buy the Italeri Truck Accessories 2 kit, which includes a great little crane. The crane turned out to be quite a complex model in its own right, and so far I have built the main assemblies and given it a coat of yellow car spray paint. It still needs the hydraulic pipes and other details adding, followed by some dark washes to tone down the dazzling yellow paint.

Next jobs for Project Heavy Haulage: Finish the crane. Fit the chassis details. Fit and complete the cab.