Wednesday, September 5, 2007

STARTING THE VW BUS RAT PROJECT




I went out and bought myself a Hasegawa 1/24 type 2 VW van kit and plan on building a rat bus. The finish will be truly used up and rusted. I also want this thing to sit low in the weeds. The kit is a curbside model, meaning that it doesn't have a detailed engine and open hood. I started by lowering the drivetrain by cutting into the frame and lowering the rear suspension. The other thing I did was equip the van with smaller tires so I could clear the wheel wells. I then applied a rust finish to the underbody, this is how I did it.

First step was to paint the frame semi gloss black. Next I dry brushed the entire thing with rust paint from Testors. Drybrushing is done by removing almost all the paint from your brush on a piece of paper until you only have color pigments on it. I then drybrushed steel color paint from Testors all over. After leaving everything to dry overnite, I applied a mixture of brown with a little yellow of dry pastel powder with a dry brush from a make up kit. Apply as much as you need to get the wanted effect. If it doesn't work, simply run the piece under a water tap and start over.

The roof rack you see was made with small styrene rods and the planks are actual wood cut to size and stain with a mix of flat Humbrol clear with a touch of brown pastel. If you want to buy pastels for weathering, buy the dry pastel and not the oil ones.

Keep posted for the next post. :)

Gerry

7 comments:

busman said...

Very cool. Who makes the model you used as the base?

Gerry Lauzon said...

The Kit is 1/24 by Hasegawa.

Gerry :)

Anonymous said...

So I came across your blog through random surfing months ago. It's sat in my RSS reader unread until today, when I got bored scanning film.

Fantastic! I'm really keen on starting to do this, and have had a Karmann convertible kit sitting in my cupboard for years. Hopefully this is the inspiration I need to get started.

Gerry Lauzon said...

I'm redoing my kitchen right now, but as soon as I'm done I will seriously sit down and finish this one.

Gerry :)

CH said...

I recently got the same Hasegawa VW kit, where did you get your wheels from? I've noticed that you said you changed the tyres, but I have different hubs which are hard to fit tires to. Did you change the whole wheel?

Gerry Lauzon said...

The wheels and tires are from a lowrider kit.

Gerry :)

Anonymous said...

I thought maybe WagensWest did the suspension :-)