To recap, I hit a bit of a brick wall with the PST kit as it wasn't long into the assembly that I discovered that some things didn't fit like they were supposed to. Namely, the ambulance body didn't mate seamlessly with the Gaz truck cab.
If, as I did, you assemble the chassis and truck cab and the ambulance body as two separate major components and then try, then, to fit the two together then you are in for a nasty surprise...
You'll notice that the cab's doors do not meet the ambulance body flush, instead, there is a recess of about a half a millimetre between the two assemblies. I guess it was my fault for trusting PST and not doing a dry fit first, I stupidly thought that this would be a straight forward build. When will I learn that there's no such thing as a straight forward build!
Anyway, I now feel ready to return to this project, but in order to get it to completion, I first had to take a step backwards and disassemble the cab by removing the doors again...
Now, the tricky part begins - working out the best way to align the doors and fit the major components together. To begin with, I tried refitting the doors first just to see if they could fit seamlessly with the ambulance body...
Well, that looks OK, but it isn't an easy fit. It may be easier if I get the ambulance body and chassis correctly mated together and then fit the doors last.
There are a couple of other issues that means I may have to do some more filling and trimming and jigging about to get everything to align properly. At the moment, with the body and chassis together the wheelbase is slightly too short (by a fraction of a millimetre) and so the rear axel is not central to the rear wheel arch.
One of the other issues is that the cab's running boards are warped. I may try softening them with hot water and then I'll attempt to straighten them out again...
I've also created a driver figure. He's a bit of a Frankenstein, the body is a 20mm (1/76) driver figure by S&S Models while the Head is a 1/72 Hat Austrian infantryman. As I have mentioned before, in order to fit a figure inside a 1/72 scale truck cab I have found that you have to go for a slightly smaller sized figure, even then I have had to amputate his feet!
The underside of the chassis is almost complete aside from the spare wheel. The PST instructions are a bit vague about how exactly this attaches to the rear of the chassis. BUT, I happen to have a Military Wheels 1/72 Gaz AA truck kit and it's instructions show where the spare wheel goes and how it's attached to the chassis...
All good, just one final thing for this session and that's to apply some modelling putty to some of the gaps in the ambulance body component...
Well, that's it for today. Once the Milliput putty has dried I will sand it smooth and then start to give the components a primer coat. Then it will be on to painting cab interior (and driver) ready for assembly.
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