discussion Italeri Heavy Road Haulage Tractor

[Guest]

DAF 2800 NTT “Cattleman” Heavy Road Haulage Tractor, model no. 765. Left hand drive and a choice of national origin marks. The designs for the decals came from the Internet. Click on each image in turn for a bigger version.

It is a companion for Italeri’s Timber trailer which I completed last year.
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Being to a 1:24 scale it is 11 inches, 28 mm, long. Satisfyingly big! The kit went together well. There were a couple of puzzles in the instructions, solved after headscratching, and all parts fitted accurately except the sun visor which was a little too short. The chassis is moulded in black plastic which I left unpainted except for the drive shafts and gearbox (grey for variation). The white parts were painted using Tamiya Synthetic Lacquer in a spraycan with a day or more between coats: primer coat (Tamiya Flat White), then a dust coating of the lacquer, a medium coat, then the final coat to wetness, followed by polishing with Micro-gloss liquid abrasive:

(http://micro-surface.com/index.php/...oss-liquid-abrasive-type-1-cleaner-polish.htm

This is also available at Amazon and others. The finish is very glossy although there is some minor orange peel effect which is very difficult to avoid. The model is extremely delicate because of the large number of attached parts – a misplaced elbow or a small boy could cause significant damage. Here are more glamour pics:
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Notice the visual pun on the back panel. (What do storks and road tractors do?)

The coiled connection lines between the tractor and the trailer are called Suzie Lines. They provide the trailer with two air lines for brakes and up to three other lines two of which supply electricity to the running lights and the turn and braking indicators. When the tractor is not coupled to a trailer the plugs on the lines previously attached to the trailer are plugged into dummy parking sockets on the tractor. The plugs and the socket board on the tractor are available from:

http://www.kitformservices.com/tq.html

Thanks to Fenlander (Graham) for mentioning this. I have assumed that the sockets on the kitformservices socket board are those dummy parking sockets (I might be wrong). However, the nicely detailed sockets on the board are far too small to take the supplied plugs so I sanded them off and made new sockets. I also scratch built a socket board for the trailer:

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Here it is complete with the timber trailer whose completion report is at:

http://www.scale-models.co.uk/threads/1-24-italeritimber-trailer.26126/

The total overall length of the two is 30 inches, 76 cm:

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[papa 695]

Fantastic work there Steve.

 

[Guest]

Nice work Steve, looks very good

 

[peterairfix]

Nice build and always nice to see a trailer to

 

[grumpa]

Beautiful!.........Jim

 

[monica]

great work Steve,lovely looking rig and trailer,real well done,

 

[Gern]

Beautiful as always Steve. No mention of the chrome parts though, are they as supplied in the kit?

 

[Guest]

Looks great, nice finish and a beast of a model! My only suggestion would be de-chrome, fill and sand the exhausts and spray with alclad or similar.

 

[Guest]

Beautiful as always Steve. No mention of the chrome parts though, are they as supplied in the kit?

Yes, all in the kit. They are very effective but have a disadvantage: it is not possible to sand out the mould seam lines, and some small evidence always remains of the the stub which attached the part to the sprue. However, they are very effective.