"End Of An Era" Vehicles WIP #1

As with most of my projects which are dioramas, they tend to develop as the project progresses. My original plan was to just have the aircraft sitting on the base by themselves, then it was decided to add a few figures with them. Further time was spent looking at the models as they were built and more ideas came to mind, I needed some vehicles on the base to!

Last year at Telford, I purchased the Airfix Club UK Military Support Set which consists of a Bedford MK refueller and a Land Rover hard roof with 0.75 ton trailer. It was decided that I would use them with the Canberra's and they were dug out from the storage box for work to start on them.

First the Bedford was started and built into the four sections ready for painting. These were the chassis, cab, fuel tank and the housing for the pumps and controls. After priming, the cab interior was painted with matt black and the same green as the exterior will be painted. Then the clear plastic body was glued onto the interior before masking the windows prior to painting. So that there would not be any primer grey showing though inside, I painted the clear plastic with some Mr Metal Primer which is clear. The the rest of the model received a coat of grey primer before a few coat of Tamiya XF61 Dark Green. Detail painting followed then the decals for the version based at RAF Wittering were used on it.

The Land Rover and trailer now were assembled and I had to make a choice on what to do with the Land Rover. There was three option in the kit for it, RAF Police, RAF Mountain Rescue and Royal Navy schemes. The Navy one was a no go and I did not fancy any of the other two either. So a compromise of the two was done using the registration of the RAF Police and the yellow band from the Mountain Rescue markings resulting in a normal looking RAF Land Rover. To hook up the trailer to the Land Rover, there was a large moulded hook on the rear of the Land Rover which looked really bad. So this got cut off to clean up the look of the rear end. The trailer was also built and it would be sat in the corner of the base out of the way. This was going to be the end of the vehicles, but guess what, it was not. But this will be in the next blog tomorrow!