German Fire Engine HLF 16/12 Feuerwehr Bremen

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you!

The small blue light is supposed to be attached to a block.

It is not possible to glue the block to the vehicle unless you skip the block with the orange lights. On the real engine the blue light sits on a flat red square with another white light below. That red square is located directly above the block with the orange lights. So I cut out a 1x1cm red square from one of the misprints and laminated it to 1mm card.

This was laminated to some leftover white paper and painted black.

A smaller rectangle cut from white paper was glued on top of the black side.

The light was glued to the red side.

Then the plate was mounted on top of the block at the rear of the vehicle:

The side mirrors needed to shine. I cut the parts out and laminated the black half to some reflective card from a chocolate box.

I cut off the black handles from the kit parts and laminated them to the reflective side of the mirrors.

The drawn mirrors were discarded.

When I was looking at the finished pieces I noticed that they were identical! Volker forgot to mirror the mirror parts. To fix this I cut off a small amount of the handles of both pieces.

The unused part for the small blue light box was recycled to make two top side mirrors:

Volker's kit does not include these but they are present on the real vehicle.

 

[Revell-Fan]

The ladders. At first I thought there were two of them with one front and one back side each. The pictures of the real vehicle revealed that the engine carries four ladders. The rungs were painted red just like on the original.

The model maker on kartonbau.de gave me a great tip to flesh out the ladder: He used laminated strips of red card to thicken the rungs. I did the same and cut out about 7m long strips from leftover card that was still in the stash.

These were laminated to a thickness of about 2mm.

The sides of the ladder are supposed to be folded up.

And after attaching 68 rungs everything looks like this:

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

The ladder looks good!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Now we have a problem. How do you attach the wheels when the only point of alignment is covered by them?

You create some anchor points. The front wheels are easy. I took the dimensions of the side of the angled axle, cut out a matching piece of paper and glued it to each front wheel. I paid attention to the seam line of the profile part and made sure that it is hidden well once the wheel is glued into place.

The back wheels were trickier because there is no axle. I measured the length from the rear edge of the undercarriage to the beginning of the wheel and marked the position. Then I measured the width of the wheel at this position (red line) and marked that point, too. That gave me the info I needed.

To apply pressure I cut a small hole into the undercarriage and put a rod inside till the glue had cured. This is not a big problem because the back will be covered by the chassis later.

 

[micahrogers]

Love how those ladders turned out, and the way you worked around the wheel mounting was ingenious.

 

[Revell-Fan]

WEEK-END!!!!!

Tomorrow is Father's Day in Germany and I have Friday off, that means at least one of the projects I'm working on will be finished soon.

Well then. Basic construction of the fire truck is complete which means I can concentrate on some minor adjustments.

The first things I changed were the markings. I created a new license plate and exchanged the Bremen emblem with the emblem of our tenant's brigade of Ottenstein. A personalized gift has a stronger impact.

I too added the Mercedes star, some lights and beefed up the front fenders.

Last but not least I made short work of the wrong wheel details and added more authentic ones.

Aft wheel. Before:

After:

Front wheel. Before:

Inbetween:

After:

YEE-HAH!

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

This is really coming together beautifully!!!

 

[micahrogers]

Nice, and I know the recipient will appreciate the personalized touches.

 

[zathros]

Don't get too close to the fire with that!!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Don't get too close to the fire with that!!

I have always a bucket of water standing by, just in case..!

 

[Revell-Fan]

It's time to think about the presentation of the model. For this reason I photomatched a picture of the fire station our tenant served at.

The building was enhanced several times. My friend told me when he started to serve the station was even smaller and had no garage for the vehicles at all (that was 62 years ago).

The latest configuration is able to store four vehicles:

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

WOW! You are making the firehouse as well! Your friend is really going to LOVE IT! I am really looking forward to seeing how it turns out!!!

 

[zathros]

Where do you keep all this stuff!!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Where do you keep all this stuff!!

In this case I don't have to worry about that since this is a present and won't stay with me, so I'm able to go "all-in" - BIG.

I chose to make the latest version of the station since it fits better with the scene and the picture reference is better. The old one featured some kind of map or escape plan of the building right on the front and I don't have any clear image of it. The latest image showing the two large vehicle stalls was from August 2017.

Rigging up the 3D model was easy but it took me a while to correct the lense and perspective distortion of the single elements and to eliminate the unwanted shadows. One of the most tedious parts: re-creating many door and window frames which cannot be seen in the image. I tried to use as much info from the picture as possible, including the reflections in the windows. That meant I had to use Pepakura. One thing I noticed: If you use a big texture in SU and Pepakura the image is resized somehow and comes out blurry and jagged. When I crop the image to pieces and apply these pieces separately the graphics get much clearer and crisper. That could be caused by SketchUp version 6 since Pep is said to support texture images of 8000 x 8000 pix. The images should be re-imported into Pep at their full resolution but since I already had to chop the image to pieces I fixed everything in SU.

In total there are four blocks with an overall length of 60cm. This gives enough detail to impress and the small pieces are still buildable. The roofs will come later as a series of laminated plates.

Unfolding was a charm.

The graphics were exported as a series of *.pngs and enhanced in Corel. I added some shadows and a few small bits like new windows, a door bell and surveillance boxes and some crisper vector versions of the emblems which had to be edited out of the texture.

24 pages printed and ready for assembly.

 

[Rhaven Blaack]

It all looks GREAT!!!

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you!

Unfortunately I don't have any dimensions of the building. If I estimate the door to be about 2m high the model will be about 1/45 ~ 1/48 which sounds pretty nice.

 

[zathros]

Very very nice. I love that the wheel;s steer on that, such an easy mechanism that really brings the model to life, along with the greebling you have done.

 

[Revell-Fan]

Thank you!

I love that the wheel;s steer on that

The wheels and the axle are not movable. The kit contains two versions, a straight axle and an angled one that gives the impression of turning wheels. I used the latter. And you are right, it looks way cooler than straight axles!

 

[zathros]

You're going to make someone very happy.

 

[Revell-Fan]

I hope so.

The four main parts of the station are assembled.

Because of the size of the parts I did not attach the back sides and bottom pieces yet. This gives me more room to work on the inside.

The windows and stalls are recessed and were all built the same way.

I did not alter the perspective of the stalls to create the illusion of depth. Remember, I have a plan and this is only the front half of the building.

The stalls and windows are glued to the back of the walls:

You can see that the roof is sagging. For this reason the inside was reinforced with corrugated card:

This doesn't need to be exact, it just has to strengthen the walls. To be continued!