#gluing

One of the most noticeable parts of the truck is the giant sized canister lid sitting right on the top. One feature of which is the ability for it to become a big prize wheel that can be spun to win things. Probably socks.

The actual mechanism of this is a mystery, if there even was a mechanism and it wasn't just manually popped off and stuck to the back somehow.

So I had a couple options. Pegs and holes came up first, but I didn't like them as either way you displayed it that meant that there'd be holes. Magnets also crossed my mind, but ultimately I didn't want the lids and the trucks to be separate.

Eventually I settled on a little 3d printed hinge. When I 3d printed the back cover for the flatbed of the truck I left in a recess that fit the 3d printed parts, and after casting, with some sanding and fiddling, I was able to get everything to fit together pretty well in the end. Mostly. I really need to keep in mind how much paint adds to the sizes of things when designing them....either build in the tolerances or be more judicious about masking.

I'm very happy with the final look and function of the mechanism.

While I'm on the topic of the canister lid I'd like to talk about the prize wheel and another reason I wanted this to be a physical project rather than a digital one: Quality of references. Comparing it to the tours that came later we actually have a lot of really good reference for these trucks; the fact we've got photos of all 6 is something you can't even say for the others. But even still they're photos from 2001, some taken off the web, some scanned from print media, so the quality isn't super high overall. So while for some decorations its fairly easy to be sure of what they are, like the big Toa vinyl wraps, for smaller details, like what was actually written on the spinner, there's nothing readable.

I feel like if I had done this as a digital model I'd have wanted to make everything legible, which would have meant having to make up details, and one thing I really want to avoid is someone then seeing these made up details and coming away thinking that they're real. So I wrote some nonsense and blurred it a bit.

Similarly with the little circles on the back windows, I have my ideas of what they might have been, and with a physical model where these details are less than 2mm tall I feel I can fudge it a bit more to just get the look across.

One really lucky thing about the trucks is that they were silver, which is close to white. With my set up, using a normal ink jet printer, I can't print white. Normal printers assume a white backing so for white they print nothing. I did consider trying to get a printer that did white, but they're so expensive. I thought of getting the decals printed by someone else, but again, the cost.

Since the truck bodies were silver I could get away with printing white, as long as it was surrounded by another colour, but the canister lids were the one place I had to admit defeat and just use black instead. I tried stamping and 3d printing and so many other things, but in the end the black decals just look so much more clean than anything I could have done in white.

Now for something I alluded to in part 1. This project began in earnest because I asked if anyone could identify this truck on twitter. Someone did, they said it was a Nissan Navara, and to my car blind eyes this seemed bang on. I searched around and found the UN toy of one, and the rest is history.

Only the problem is right as I was finishing someone unearthed an interview with someone who worked on the tours who said it was a Nissan Frontier...

I was incredibly devastated and considered tossing out all of the mostly complete trucks. But I got through it. There aren't that many differences really. Apparently they ARE the same truck, its just that for the usarican market they renamed it to the Frontier, put some rivet holes around the wheel arches, and changed up the front grill. The most obvious of these is the grill, but luckily this design features a big mask stuck right over the front.

So on the one hand, its annoying and if I had learned it just a week earlier I could have added the rivets as decals, on the other, from my searching there isn't an equivalent model of a Nissan Frontier out there, so if I had gotten the correct information the project may never have started in the first place!

At least the wheels match.

This is the first project I've used super glue on, since it required some plastic to metal joining. Usually since most of what I do is plastic to plastic I've gotten away with just normal model cement.

It was quite fun honestly, though there was a bit of a learning curve as I figured out how to store, apply, and most importantly dispose of it. Had to eat dinner one evening with my middle two fingers stuck together on one hand and my thumb and forefinger stuck together on the other. But outside of that the speed at which I was able to stick things together and have them be workable meant I was able to get the Tahu boy done in an afternoon.

The biggest issue in the project came right at the end. I really messed up the wheels completely and utterly. For the wheels themselves I made the mistake of drilling out the centres with the not flat side down, which meant that the holes were all wonky. And then for the holes in the body I drilled the forward ones too far forward so the wheels didn't fit even if they were straight. Just a complete and utter mess.

What I had to do in the end was build a jig to have the trucks all at the correct height and then mark out where the holes should go to have the wheels centred in the wheel arches. Then I drilled the hole and had to glue the wheels in place in a very specific way so there was minimal wobble, meaning all 4 wheels were on the ground. It wasn't the best note to end the project on all things considered...

This project has been the most complex project I've completed to date. It features: -3D modelling and printing -graphics design and decal printing and application -moulding and casting -lots and lots of painting And all the complications that come with doing this not once, but 6 times!