Military Wheels Lublin-51 - load bed and wheels.

The load bed is made up from 9 parts, and was a pain to assemble. Underneath there are two longitudinal and two cross members which have slots moulded into them for location. Those slots are far too big and not particularly accurate...

However after much messing and cursing I managed to build it so that it marries up to the chassis. Note the rather heavy sides.

The wheels have, as you can imagine, some heavy mould lines around the tyres;

On the front and spare wheels I just removed them with a file, but I decided on a different approach for the rears. The twin wheels were glued together with the inner wheel the wrong way round, that is with the dish facing the outer wheel rather than the chassis. This made it easier to fit the wheels onto a 1.5mm steel rod, held in place with a little cyano, so they could be held in my lathe and turned true;

This was the easiest way to clean up the tyres so that they match. I then used a graver to add some tread relief, as bald tyres are of little use even on 'braille scale' lorries. (I find it funny how military modellers refer to 1:72 as 'braille scale', to my eye its noticably bigger than the 1:76 scale that most of us railway modellers use.)

There's no rear lights on the model, so I spent a lot of time staring at photos and videos on t'web tying to work out the rear light detail, with little success. The majority of photos are of the front or sides, and it seems that most surviving vehicles have been modified in some way regarding those lights. However, I came to the conclusion that small circular lights set halfway up into the rear wooden bed crossmember would be somewhere near right, so I filed a couple of slots and used some 1mm dia. styrene rod to represent the elusive lamps. They can just be seen in the photo below;

I also added mudguards, made from .020" plasticard;

The white strips on the cross braces are there to help position the longitudinal beams.

I used Vallejo 70.601 Grey Surface Primer sprayed through my 200NH on both the wheels and the load bed, this is the first time that I've used this particular primer. Then the load bed was sprayed Vallejo 890 Refractive Green, which is a match for the Humbrol Olive Green specified. The mudguards and the bodies of the lamps were painted dirty black, and the lights themselves painted firstly white then orange and finally red.

The wheels were sprayed with Vallejo 866 Grey Green, with a touch of black added, then the hubs were brush painted with Phoenix Precision Dirty Black acrylic;

For the top coats I used my Badger 150. 

A couple more from the manual, first up showing how it all fits together;

And wheels and tyres;

Cab next, which I'm not looking forward to...

Paul.