Question for you on turning the Polish bodies towing vehicles into Fiat 508s, how did you remove the casted side wheel spare? Thanks!
Here's kind of the whole process.
First, the starting point:
From the GHQ catalog, this is the "Polski Fiat" PZInz302 that we start with.
This is my core set of hobby tools. You see (bottom to top) cuticle cutter, flat-sided tapered triangle head metal file, hobby knife (xacto/razor blade), thumb drive, bent flat-headed tweezers and pin headed tweezers. I didn't use all of them for this project, but I have this one pic of all of them for potentially multiple project posts. The H-35m39 tank model is just to provide a sense of size.
We will make a few small modifications to the model.
First, I used the cuticle cutter to do the first level slicing off of the spare wheel. Then I used the hobby knife to scrape the cut area flat (you get a pronounced ridge with the cutters (pronounced at this scale, at least). Then I used the flat-sided triangle head metal file to file the side of the vehicle where the wheel had been located.
Here you can see the result. The wheel is now gone.
The PZInz302 had the front doors removed compared to the original Fiat 508. So I then filled the open space with acrylic gel medium, and smoothed it out with a flat toothpick. Any sort of modelling putty would probably do for this step, but I find the acrylic gel to be convenient because I use it for mounting and texturing my infantry bases, so I have it handy and am familiar with working it.
A spare wheel is then added on the back (alas the process of removing the spares from the sides does not generate useful spares for the back, so these were sourced from towed gun bases in the extras bin).
If the intent is to leave the vehicle with the top open, there is an added complexity in that he rear seat in the PZInz302 faces backwards. In the Fiat 508 it faces forwards. That is easily enough disguised by placing a kneeling gun crew figure, with legs snipped off (with cuticle cutter) into the position that someone seated on the proper back seat would take up. Now you can't really see that the seat is in the wrong place. Also, the folded down roof needs to be modeled along the back of the rear deck. Again I used acrylic gel for this, but any suitable modeling putty would work.
To model it with the roof up, I used the canvas roof from the GHQ US Jeep models. The struts were clipped off. It was shortened a bit in length, to match the distance from the front of the rear deck to the windshield (note that on the Fiat 508 the rear deck was not covered by the canvas roof when it was up). The corners were rounded down a bit with the flat-sided metal file. Then some acrylic gel (putty) to fill in the corners a bit.
Kind of a long answer to a short question. But maybe others can draw out some information on other issues too.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)