The following was written by a good modeling bud of mine over on another site.


John, I really love this diorama. The wrecked plane is beautiful. The whole thing is magnificent.!!!

I would advise you to not put a vehicle in front of the hanger and wrecked plane.
Unless you rearrange the hanger and the wrecked plane, the vehicle will overpower the wrecked plane and the hanger. By "overpower" I mean the vehicle becomes the main attraction. The vehicle becomes the story. It will steal the story away from the planes.

Viewers will ask, in their mind; so what about this vehicle? Who just arrived? Who was driving the vehicle? What is it doing there?

I think the story is the wrecked plane and the plane they are working on in the hanger. The vehicle should only support that story.

John, I love your work. I hope you don't take this the wrong way. It's only my opinion.

My response;

Hi Jim! thank you for taking the time to express your opinion on this. I also have been quite reluctant to do this and for the same reasons, but all that open space in the left hand front of the diorama somehow bothers me.I can't quite put my finger on what it is,would you have any other suggestions or do you think it is OK as is?
Don't worry about the truck as I originally thought of putting it out back of the hangar anyway.
If anyone else would care to weight in on this subject please feel free to do so.Knowing when enough is enough has always been a problem for me.

Another pic.

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The Junk Truck.......
This ground support vehicle will be picking up junk out back of the hangar.I haven't yet quite decided whether it will be military or civilian.In keeping with it's duties the truck will be pretty junky itself.Even if it were military I figure that a truck involved in this task would not be the shiniest in the fleet nor would it bear all the usual proud military insignia.
Like the running board, I decided to make my own style front fenders out of wood ,which was not all that uncommon a thing to do in the early days.

I love doing these early trucks because of the room for your own creativity that is involved.It would take a keen and very knowledgeable eye to spot this as being once a Rolls Royce chassis, especially after I weather the whole thing..
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"Once upon a time......." Storyboard dioramas by JohnReid.
My photobucket:
http://s6.photobucket.com/albums/y250/JohnReid/

OK ,this is as far as I plan to go with the junk truck.Anything more would just look overdone.When I add the junk to the truck's bed there will be plenty of interesting stuff to look at.Now it's on the the part I love most the weathering.

I have a little update as to when the museum will be ready for my stuff.Looks now that not before August ,which is fine by me as I really prefer finishing off the landscaping surrounding the hangars outside on my porch during the warm weather.Maybe I will add a few things too..........

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Lets try that again

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This build will be found in my photobucket in album "Fuel Wagon Albatros"

I have a few left over wheels,tires and springs from another build ,the rest will be scratch.
When I saw the pic of the RFC fuel wagon I just couldn't resist building something similar.I am assuming here that based on the technology of the day wagons like this would be pretty much the same from country to country.This could be a converted farm wagon or something that was built "in the field" by the ground personnel themselves.Anyway that's my story and I am sticking to it!
Well here goes,should be fun.

I changed my mind!
The white chassis looked a little flimsy so I decided to use another instead.The last pic I took is shown here.If you look on my photobucket under the fuel wagon album you will see in pic 004 the basic chassis glued together,pic 005 the cut down chassis where I shortened the whole thing and then glued it back together again.Pic 006 is a top view of the shortened version.

CAM Pics in photobucket.
For those who may be interested I have opened a new album in my photobucket called CAM, for pictures that I took at the Canada Aviation Museum prior to their latest rearrangement of the displays last summer.

Another pic