How Not To Photograph A Truck Model

One day I'll take a better photograph of this combination, but not tonight. Here we have a 1/24th scale John Deere 310 backhoe, a 1/24th scale International Paystar 5000 dump truck, and a scratchbuilt beavertail trailer. Everything here has been modified or scratchbuilt.

I modified the truck, which looked very strange to my mind. It looked very "East Coast" with its enormously high box sides and pronounced "cow catcher" on the front bumper. I cut the dump box down considerably, which easy on the sides but a little trickier on the tailgate (I needed to preserve the hinge and latch details, which meant I had to take a strip out of the middle instead of simply hacking off the top). I greatly reduced the size of the cab rock guard, and sawed off and threw away the ridiculous front bumper railing. I really wanted to replace the strange cleated tires, but I'm not well-supplied with spare truck tires, so I used what came in the kit. I should have modified it a bit further. Looking at it, is seems quite obvious to me that the rear axles are about three quarters of an inch too close to the rear end of the frame. I should have moved them forward a bit, which would have been easy enough in the early stages of construction (the rear suspension is, I believe, a Hendrickson "walking beam" suspension, and it wouldn't have been difficult at all to move the mounts). As it is, the rear axles are set so far to the rear the mud flaps wouldn't fit without substantial modification of their mounts. I painted the truck with semi-gloss black, authentic John Deere green, and water-based off-white latex spray paint. I was not favorably impressed with the performance of the latex spray paint; it had poor coverage and tended to run badly, but it was probably never really intended for plastic anyway.

I modified the John Deere backhoe mainly by cutting off the ROPS (Roll-Over Protection System, otherwise known as "the roof"). I like older equipment, and taking the ROPS off seemed to add about fifteen years to the tractor's age. Otherwise it was built more or less out of the box, though it was weathered heavily with washes on the tractor and tires. I used my normal weathering technique on the bucket and hoe, which was to paint them the normal yellow, then overspray them with dark brown, and then drybrush them heavily with a lighter rust color and then drybrush them a whole lot with silver to represent metal polished by contact with the ground.

The trailer was something I scratchbuilt out of oddments that I had laying around - ABS I-beams and angle iron left over from something else, lots of Swiffer sheet styrene, and eight resin castings of the wheels and tires from a Jeep pickup truck kit (they're about the right size and have the right square-shouldered profile, but the wheels aren't quite right).