Traffic Jam!

Introduction

I've written a few posts on paper models recently, so I think it's only fair that I photograph my entire collection.  As well as being a visual treat for your eyes (I hope!), getting the entire collection together in one place also allows me to take stock, find any notable omissions, spot any damage that may have occurred and so on.

Everything together in one big picture

So, let's break this down...

Military Vehicles

My army trucks and APCs are all from Genet Models, which used to be known as Ebbles Models, I think.  These all come from the Patrol and Convoy kits - at least, that's what they were called when I bought them.  I think that the site may have been rearranged since then.

One note about the Genet kits: they're huge!  If I remember correctly then I printed these out at 84% or so of the original size - and they're still very large vehicles, if not quite so overwhelming as before.  At least you can resize paper models easily!

Emergency Services

My collection of emergency response vehicles are almost entirely police machines and almost entirely from WorldWorks Games. There is a single ambulance but no fire engines (a distinct gap in the market, I think.  I've not seen a fire engine yet that I would wish to build).

The other outsider is a solitary white "No Go Zone" police car in British colours.  It's a nice idea, but the car body has a very complex shape and the texturing is bland.  I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you are an experienced card modeller and have a particular need for UK-branded cop cars.

"Regular" Cars

Here is my collection of compact and sedan cars.  All of the ones at the back are from WorldWorks, but the four at the front are from Stoelzel's Structures, if I remember right.

Note the convertible at the front: I'm very pleased to have it, but it did take a lot more effort to build than any of the other vehicles here.  Obviously, it has an interior and that complicates the design quite a bit.

Also note that the convertible is a little larger than the other "civilian" automobiles.  This inconsistency of scale is something that afflicts most manufacturers to some extent.  Mind you, I think that WorldWorks is probably a far worse offender than Stoelzel in this respect.

Trucks and Buses

I have a relatively small collection of large commercial vehicles: 2 buses and 2 articulated trucks (with 1 extra trailer).  Also there's a garbage truck.  This latter is an early WorldWorks model and although it has all the right components, it just doesn't look quite right to me.  The cab is too narrow, the body too wide and tall.  Additionally, the double tyres at the back are badly aligned with the single tyres at the front.  It's an odd model.

On another note, buses are some of the easiest card models to make, so I would recommend them strongly to anyone who wished to begin making this type of kit.

Pick-ups, Estates and Vans

I have considerably more light commercial vehicles than I do of the large ones.  Most of these are from WorldWorks, though 2 in the front row are Stoelzel's and the white box van at the rear is a No Go Zone kit (one of my least favourite models.  It was a little awkward to build and I don't think that the result is very impressive)

Note that this picture clearly shows one of the worst discrepancies in scale between the WorldWorks vans and their pick-ups.  I'm not an expert on cars and trucks in real life, but surely the vans should be rather bigger than the pick-ups?  If anything, it's the other way round for these models.  As before, I could resize the printouts, but it's somewhat annoying to have to do so when the kits are all from the same publisher.

Oddments

These are the remaining vehicles that didn't seem to fit into any other category.  There are 2 "Lamborgharri"s, 2 burnt out compacts, 3 motorcycles, a classic roadster and a hearse.  The latter is from Mega Miniatures; the rest are again from WorldWorks.

Most of these models (apart from the hearse) are significantly more complex than average to build.  You should be able to tell this just by looking at them!

Conclusion

This may look like a lot of models, but remember that each one is very cheap to make.  Once the kit has been purchased, each new car is typically just half a sheet of cardboard and a little printer ink and glue.  They're also relatively quick to build, which is partly why I have so many: card vehicles are very good filler models between other projects or when you only have small amounts of time for the hobby.  I've never sat down to build more than 2 or 3 vehicles at any one time, yet over the years the collection has grown steadily!

So, what do I think is missing from this collection?  Well, I could use more estate cars (station wagons).  The Stoelzel's car set has a number of these in it so I'm certain to build some in due course.  There are no good fire engines on the market, at least ones that I know about.  And I've never come across any kits for construction or agricultural vehicles, apart from a single excavator (?) in one of the WorldWorks kits.  I'd really like a cement mixer; imagine what you could do in a game with that!

28mm Big Rigs

Introduction

A little while ago, I mentioned that I was building some WorldWorks trucks for my 28mm modern wargames such as All Things Zombie: here.  Note that this was an impulse decision and not based on a need for trucks in any upcoming scenario.  Still, here we are!

So far, I have built 3 semi-trailers and 2 tractors.  That's probably enough for now; much as I enjoy building these vehicles I do need some time for all the other model-making projects which have been on hold for the past 2 weeks or so!

The Container Semi-Trailer

Both the red and the blue tractors have been built straight from the WorldWorks Mayhem Industrial kit and so I won't spend a lot of time describing them - the only modification is the addition of a socket to take the trailer's coupling, as described in my previous article.  Mayhem Industrial gives 3 choices of colour scheme for each of the long-nose and cab-over variants (blue, yellow & green for the long-nose and red, white & black for the cab-over), but sadly there's no black long-nose.  Maybe I'll kitbash one some day, with a little rubber duck mascot on top of the bonnet/hood?

The container semi-trailer is also built straight from the kit and is also one of the 3 possible variants that are supplied.

The Flatbed Semi-Trailer

As well as the container semi-trailer, I thought that a flatbed would be useful.  I can put any kind of loads I like on this: logs, concrete pipe sections or large pieces of machinery.

For the most part, this is also built straight from the WorldWorks kit; it's basically just the container semi-trailer but without the container on top.  There are a few minor modifications to my version, though:

• I've added a "headboard" at the front, to stop loads from sliding forwards into the tractor.  This was cut from a spare piece of the trailer bed, so it matches the colouring and style perfectly.
• The card for the upper and lower sides of the trailer bed were separated and then used to sandwich a piece of mounting board.  This makes the model much thicker and rather stronger than it would have been otherwise.
• As with all of my semi-trailers, I've glued a Hama bead on the underside to act as a pivot.  This fits into the tractor's socket and thus holds the rig together.

The Tanker Semi-Trailer

Articulated tankers are such an important part of many movies and other sources of inspiration that I just had to have one.  However there was no such model in the Mayhem Industrial set.  What was I to do?

So, there are essentially 2 parts to this model: the undercarriage and the tank itself.  The undercarriage is all from the WorldWorks kit, but very heavily modified.  The tank is entirely my own design.

I'm not a graphic designer of any kind, but I'm reasonably good with 3d shapes and how they can be built up from 2d designs (nets).  The tank itself is just an oval prism, though I swept back the front end a bit.  I have added some texture to the model, but sadly it doesn't look very evident in any of these pictures.

Rolling a card tube of this length is very difficult, so I added an old block of balsa along the centreline.  Even with this support, I'm not entirely happy with the way that the tank turned out.  The front was particularly troublesome and I couldn't get the curve even from top to bottom - I don't know why.  Perhaps I should have added more formers along the length of the tank?

Compared with the tube, the top block (with the hatches) was very easy to build.  Note that this tanker is about 4 or 5cm shorter than it would be if the model were true to scale.  That matches the length of the WorldWorks semi-trailers.  I haven't measured them but I suspect that this is a compromise in the name of playability.

As mentioned before, the undercarriage of this model has been adapted from the WorldWorks components.  Here are the main differences:

• The "underbody" has been narrowed considerably, so that it just peeks out from underneath the tank.
• I've changed the wheel arrangement from 2 axles with double tyres on each side (i.e. 8 wheels) to a 3 axle, single type arrangement (i.e. 6 wheels).  This involved both widening and lengthening the axle unit, as well as sourcing some single wheels from the tractor unit.
• A mudguard was taken from the "long-nose" tractor and lengthened (a lot) and narrowed (a little).  I also changed the colour to a neutral grey, before fitting the mudguards around a specially-designed black half-oval.

Conclusion

These are nice models to have and will no doubt find a use in my ATZ games or anything with a similar (modern) setting.  For the most part, they're straightforward to build (but oh, I'm tired of making wheels!).  The tanker semi-trailer took far longer than all the others put together; this was entirely due to the design work needed.  Every time I undertake such a task, I come out of it wondering where all the hours went!

10-10, Good buddy!

More Card Models

Introduction

After my last post about card vehicles, UrbanWolf and others offered suggestions to address some of the issues that I was having with the models - thanks, guys.  I investigated these ideas and found myself going rather further than I had intended.  The remainder of this post describes all this new activity, at least so far.

Mega Miniatures Hearse

Whilst browsing over the WargamesVault site, I discovered that Mega Miniatures had made some paper models.  Even though Mega Miniatures is now all but defunct, these models are still available to purchase, typically for 50 cents (USD) each.  Many of them are a bit too cartoon-like for my taste, but some are very nice.

This is the hearse from the "Hearse and Mausoleum" set.  As paper vehicles go, it's pretty basic, but it fits together well and is quick and easy to make.

The original kit is really just a hollow shell, so I've filled in the underside with some black mounting board.  As well as stiffening the model, this adds a little substance to an otherwise lightweight model.

I've also built up some wheels using components from other kits; the original just had the outer wheel silhouette and that would have had very little strength on its own.  Mind you, the added wheels alone probably took as much build time as the rest of the model.

The back window has some sort of "ghoul" peering out; I'm not sure that I like this.  I might eventually build this model again, but edit the source to remove the creature!

Note that this hearse has wing mirrors!  I've never seen another paper vehicle kit that had such a feature; it shows the different emphasis that the kit designer has used: wing mirrors, but no underbody or wheels. That's just an observation on my part and shouldn't be taken as a criticism, mind you.

Warm Acre: White Van

Here's a model from another publisher of paper vehicles who is probably better known for their metal miniature range.  This time it's a white van from Warm Acre's catchy-named "Vehicles for Modern 28mm Wargaming" set.  As well as this box van, the set also includes another type of white van and red and blue versions of a small car.

This time, the designer has gone for a complex body shape on the cab, with curves in 3 dimensions (most paper vehicles have slab sides/flat faces, for simplicity).  The truck also has a complex way of positioning the wheels; again I felt it necessary to build these up considerably with components from other kits.  Between the cab and the wheels, this has to be one of the most complex paper/card kits that I have undertaken in a long while, so I wouldn't recommend it for beginners.

You might expect that the more realistic shape of the cab and wheel positioning would lead to a much better end result.  In this case, I think that the publisher has pretty much ignored any attempt at texturing the surfaces, so the vehicle shows no signs of rust, splashes of dirt, reflections or anything like that.  Additionally, the dashed fold marks are very obvious; these could have been disguised better.   In my view this lack of detail drags the Warm Acre models down a long way, especially compared with texturing experts such as WorldWorks Games.

Note that Warm Acre also make a British police car, police van and ambulance, as well as a number of buildings.  These are subjects that are difficult to find elsewhere, so if you want them as paper models then this may be the way to go.

WorldWorks Trucks

For a long time, I've regretted not buying the Mayhem Industrial set from WorldWorks Games whilst it was still in their catalogue.  However, after my last post I was informed that it was still available from paizo.com .  Although it was rather more expensive than the other kits described above, I wanted some big rigs for my games and this was the best way to get them, I thought.

With my newly-purchased download, I set to work.  So far I've completed a single tractor unit: the red "cab over".  Note that most of the shapes in this model are simple cuboids or cylinders; from that point of view its an easy kit to build.  Of course, the truck is composed from quite a lot of different such pieces, so it may be straightforward but it takes longer than some other paper kits!

The truck models from Mayhem Industrial don't have a coupling between the tractor and trailer.  I suppose that the model-maker is expected to either glue them together or to just rest one piece on the other.  That wasn't good enough for me, so I've built a socket into the back of the tractor - the insert I used came from the end of a cheap felt-tip pen that had recently expired.  When I finish a trailer unit, I'll add a spigot in the right location on the underside (probably made from a Hama bead, as we have thousands of those around the house and my kids aren't likely to miss a few).  The trailer will then just plug loosely into the tractor and allow the 2 parts to be positioned at any angle whilst not falling apart easily.

As you can see, I haven't got as far with my first trailer.  Most of the sub-assemblies have been completed, but there is still a little way to go before this container body is finished.

I plan to make at least one more tractor (probably a "long nose") and several trailers.  In particular, I'd like a flatbed trailer and a tanker, though the latter will require some kitbashing as this WorldWorks kit doesn't include such an option.

Light Bar for "Echo 1"

One of the things that I mentioned in my last post was a desire to add a light bar to Stoelzel's Structures "Echo 1", to see if the vehicle might resemble more closely that used by the Ghostbusters in the film of that name.  I've taken the police car light bar from Mayhem Police and used GIMP to change it from red-white-blue to blue-white-blue.  Note that for now, the light bar is just placed roughly in the right position - it's not glued on yet.  This is really because I want to know what my readers think: does it improve the vehicle?  The original "Ecto 1" had a whole lot of other clutter on the roof as well, but I don't feel up to emulating that.  What do you think?