I wish you all the luck Jason. Just amazing builds you show us.
Love the crane!!!
The final pictures, just can't wait to see them.

Cheers,

RJ

Hi Jason
Your work looks good.I am sorry I only found your work now. I had to build my crane from scratch as there were no kits available at the time. The load is the important one. I put an LCVP on my build for the IPMS Nationals 2011 in Cape Town South Africa and came in 2nd place overall. As soon as I have mastered the camera I will post photos. I wish you the best of luck for the competition and see a definite gold model.
Regards
Leonel Da Silva (Visfoot)

Leonel,

I'd love to see pictures of that diorama!

Hi Jason will put it all together again and take photos the dust go to it busy cleaning the D/wagon and the trailer loaded with the LCVP.your build is great and you all in the real world have so much info, to see the dragon would be quite an experience.
Cheers
visfoot

9 months of work
5 vehicles
25 figures
2 ducks
1 dog
1 complete and utter loss of sanity

And it’s finally done!





At over 4 feet long and 1.5 feet wide, I had to take this diorama outside to photograph the thing decently as I couldn’t even properly illuminate such a large diorama otherwise. As one friend put it: “I don’t know how, but you managed to make a Dragon Wagon look small!”

Building the diorama itself was an exercise in ridiculousness, some parts of which nearly drove me nuts. The water, for instance, took three attempts to get right and I’ll make a separate post about it in a couple of days to explain why. I’m proud to say casting it only drove me to tears twice!

The diorama itself is based off of this image:



I didn’t want to just make a copy of the above image, as I wanted to show the dragon wagon with its windows open, and put the gun mount on the LCM3, etc, so consider this more an expansion on the above image.

One challenge I discovered while building this diorama is simply the use of space. The LCM3 and dragon wagon are very large, and the crane requires a certain amount of room next to them to get the boom centered over the LCM3, not to mention the location of the WC56 command car. This means I ended up with a LOT of open space that needs to be filled or it would look empty and boring.

Obviously figures and accessories would help fill in the space, but they needed to be there for a reason, so I ended up essentially turning the empty space into a series of vignettes.




The first ‘vignette’ is some of the dragon wagon crew and an MP, who’s there to maintain order with such a large populous of civilians around (in the original photo). He and the motorcycle are the Miniart Harley WLA with MPs kit, which was a fantastic kit to put together. Some parts of the motorcycle were VERY fiddly to put together, but it’s a beautiful kit. I added all of the engine, brake and electrical wiring, made a thinner replacement windscreen, and remade the Thompson machine gun holster (the weakest part of the kit, imho).

The figure controlling the winch is a modified Tamiya figure with a Hornet head. I modified the controls so he’s using them correctly to slowly reel in the LCM3.



The second vignette is a camera crew having an argument over where to setup to get the best video. In the original historical image you can see them by the bow of the second loaded LCM3, so obviously they decided to move the camera in the end.

Off to the right side are a group of three soldiers and their Welsh springer spaniel, who are breaking into a nice pallet of apples appropriated as a small snack.



The third vignette is a group of three figures keeping warm around a fire. Given that this occurred in march in Maastrich, and had rained recently, this seemed logical.




This fourth vignette has no figures per say and is a table the soldiers have set up to clean and disassemble the 50 cal machine guns after removing them from their mounts on the LCM3 for transport.



On the other side of the crane are the spare fuel and water, including some tarp-covered drums. I even went to the trouble of adding the red gasoline and black diesel octane tags, because why not?



Here are some of the ‘spectators’ watching the LCM3 being hauled out of the water. They’re from a variety of sources, including Alpine minatures, Tamiya, Miniart, etc, pretty much any allied non-infantry soldiers I could find who weren’t carrying around weapons.



A soldier calling out to and signaling the crane operator, helping to direct him. You can actually just barely see his feet and a scrape piece of wood between the Dragon Wagon trailer and the LCM3 hull in the original image.



And finally a member of the Dragon Wagon crew helping to direct the winch operator.

So that completes the tour of the diorama. This was a ridiculous challenge, which I’m exceptionally happy to have finally finished. I plan to bring it to the London, Ontario IPMS show and we’ll see how it does. I’ll say one thing for certain though: I’m never building a diorama this large again! In fact I think I’ll take it easy for a bit and my next kit is going to built straight from the box! *gasp*

Here are some other miscellaneous images. Enjoy!

Holy mother of pearl, that's nice! Great job

As above, nothing more to add...

Marvelous workmanship! How much beer (and or booze) did you consume while engaged in this project?

Does the isopropanol in the Tamiya thinner count?

Nice work Jason! As I am drawn further into this dio, the more beautiful it gets! Thank you for sharing the detailed build log and excellent scene descriptions.

—mike

FANTASTIC work! - - I love it as I was planning more or less on doing the exact same thing

Please note: the camera crew in your dio IS NOT under any circumstances taking a "video"! (By the way where did you get that camera and film crew as I definitely need one? I have seen the British Corespondent group but not the US)

Also; and this is a very small item. It is doubtful that the crane would be sitting on those wooden bridge ramps. The ramps/trestles would not only have to support the weight of the crane but also the weight of whatever the crane was lifting. A crane operator would never position his equipment on an unsure footing.

The trestles in the prototype photo are for the purposes of doing light under body maintenance on wheeled vehicles such as field cars, lite trucks, etc.

Regards Mike K.
165th Signal Photo Re-enactor Company

A film, perhaps?

The camera is from the plus models US ww2 cameraman set. the camera is gorgeous and in scale, but the figure it comes with is terrible. He's huge and likely really 1/32 scale. So I just used the camera alone.




I'm going to have to disagree here. If you look on both sides there are those ramps, given the angle, the height of the LCM3 hull, and the height the crane cab roof is above the LCM3 hull, the crane either has to be on the trestle on that side, or the tracks/running gear of the crane would need to be about the size of a full sherman tank hull. It would also explain why the ramps on those trestles have the wooden 'steps', often required for getting something with wheels/tracks up a slope.

Also, in the full size image I have you can see two heads sticking up just past the LCM3 hull on the crane side. Assuming these guys are standing on the ground near the edge of the water, and they're on average 5'6" (I think that was the average soldier height in WW2 from what I recall), then the base of the cab is bout 5 feet off the ground. It either has to be on the trestle, or have wheels/tracks almost 5 feet tall.

In the end we may never know unless someone has an image of the other side where the crane is, in which case I would LOVE to see it!

Bloody brilliant and the figure composition and interaction is one of the most natural and believable I have seen.

Just magnificent!
Gary

top quality, thanks for sharing!

Thanks! The figurework is one thing I've been focusing on of late. While not perfect by any means, at least I'm no longer embarrassed by my figure faces.

Jason,
You have pulled that off Beautifully!

Cheers Rob.

Wow!!! Excellent!!!

As promised, here is the post on how I cast the water in the diorama.

-------------------------------


A warning here: This is a LONG post, detailing the issues I had casting water and how to overcome them. If you want, feel free to skip to the end for my final tips on the subject. I’ll also be posting this to the LCM3 thread I started.

-------------------------------

Water, water everywhere, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy!

Okay, maybe that’s going a little far, but the simulated water in this diorama gave me such a headache that I figured I should make a separate post to explain why and some suggestions for how others can avoid my many, many mistakes.





This is the water I wound up with. It’s tinted, and has waves, but is clear enough to see the bricks of the retaining wall under the water and the LCM3 hull as well.

Be aware that this post only applies to casting large amounts of water. Small streams, ponds, etc, are frankly jokingly easy in comparison and can be made with almost any water simulation material from gloss acrylic media to epoxy resin, etc. For those I recommend either epoxy resin or woodland scenic realistic water.

When I began making the diorama I planned to use smooth-on clearcast 200, a clear urethane casting resin that smooth-on says is perfect for embedding things in, like the LCM3. I’m a big fan or smooth-on silicon and resins for casting parts, so I figured I’d try this. I even called them to confirm it would work and they said yes and that it should be poured in one large pour rather than layered. They said it could be degassed, which means if you have a vacuum chamber (I do for casting parts anyway) then I’d have no issues with air bubbles.

http://www.smooth-on.com/Urethane-Plastic-a/c5_1120_1156/index.html



Of course, I wasn’t about to just randomly pour it onto my carefully prepared base and model without testing it, so I tested it in a variety of plastic containers painted with Tamiya paints, to ensure no adverse reaction between the urethane and the paint. Frankly, it cast beautifully. I could degas it to avoid air bubbles, and it hardened overnight. If I caught it at the right time I could even sculpt waves into it by pressing down on it with a small spatula. I could even tint it easily with clear Tamiya paints.

So I ordered over 100 dollars worth of the stuff (remember, large area being cast here!) and did my pour. All my measurements were perfect (checked on a digital scale with a 0.05+-g) and degassed it as usual. It poured, looks great, so I left it to cure for a while.

An hour later I came back to disaster. There were air bubbled rising all throughout it, and it was already so solid waves couldn’t be sculpted. Panicked, I managed to pull the LCM3 free from the nearly-solid water without much damage (luckily), and pry the thankfully-still malleable water out of the diorama and into the trash.

What had happened? Two things: firstly, pouring that much resin at once caused it to cure MUCH more rapidly, even though smooth-on said that wouldn’t happen. Secondly, even though the base was sealed with polyurethane varnish, Tamiya acrylic paints, and then future floor wax gloss coat and left to dry for a week, there was somehow still enough exposed wood and thus moisture to react with the urethane and generate air bubbles. Those bubbles began to drift up to the surface, but got trapped in the rapidly curing resin.

So suffice it to say that was a failure.

On the plus side though I managed to save the LCM3 and only had to repaint a bit of the bow.

After doing so, and preparing the base again, I set about trying again. This time I decided to use polyester resin, namely envirotex polyester resin. This stuff is intended to be layered and is often used by modelers for streams and other such things. As it can also be degassed, the risk of air bubbles is substantially reduced, and it can be tinted with either Tamiya clear paints, or their own tints (I used their own tints to ensure nothing reacted badly).



I read the section on casting water in Mig’s FAQ book, and he says you can sculpt waves the same way as I tried with the urethane resin, by indenting the nearly cured resin with a tool. So I tested this in a variety of container sizes, including a wooden one this time just to make sure. While the resin cast okay, it was difficult getting the waves to form well, but after 4 or 5 tests I felt semi-confident.



This time, following the instructions exactly, I poured the water in layers 1/8 inch thick. The first four layers cast beautifully and I was getting very excited. Then it was time to cast the layer with the waves. I waited until the waves would ‘hold’ based on my test casts, and went at it. At first the waves wouldn’t hold their shape, but finally they started to. Now here’s the issue: Remember when I said this was a large area? Well, by the time I got half way across it the waves began to harden to the point where they either wouldn’t form at all, or would form with all sorts of minor air bubbles/stress marks in them. And trust me, I was working as fast as possible!

Frankly, it looked terrible. The waves didn’t really look all that much like waves, and they had air bubbles/stress marks in them, etc. My only option was to sand down the worst of the areas and then pour a new layer on top. This was not fun and generated so much sanding dust my hair was nearly white by the end!

The final layer went on and it looked…okay, at best. Flat, with no waves, but at least there weren’t that many air bubbles visible.

And then the shrinkage began. Now, understand, I expected a small amount of shrinkage of the resin and the instructions even warn about it. What I didn’t expect was that said shrinkage would tear the paint and front hull ramp off of the embedded LCM3 hull!

Yeah, not happy about that one.

So with the damage to the hull and the flat/unsatisfactory result, I decided to try to remove the LCM3 and redo the water again.

This time I wasn’t so lucky. The LCM3 hull cracked during removal, and the retaining wall of the diorama was also destroyed.

Now I was pissed.

I had avoided using epoxy resin for the water because it can’t be degassed and it can’t be sanded. You can remove air bubbles by letting them rise to the surface and torching them, but if anything goes wrong, there’s no real recovery option. Because its epoxy and very sticky, its also a lot more difficult to sculpt waves into, to the point where most ship and train modelers who use it recommend not even trying and instead topping it with something else to make waves with.

So fast forward a month and I rebuilt the LCM3, rebuilt the diorama retaining wall, chiseled the polyester resin out of the base, and got everything back to ‘ready to cast’ stage. Once again, I ensured the base was properly sealed with several layers of polyurethane, several layers of Tamiya paint to simulate the depth of the water, and several layers of clear gloss to prevent anything from reacting. Once again I tested the epoxy in a variety of different containers, and made sure it didn’t react negatively with anything.



As per the envirotex epoxy resin instructions, I made sure to cast in several thin layers, this time without trying to put waves in at all. Air bubbles were rapidly torched out with a kitchen crème brulee torch, which thankfully didn’t melt the LCM3. In end I wound up with a perfectly clear, tinted water base I was happy with. No shrinkage, no tearing off of the LCM3 hull paint, etc.

So now it was on to the waves.

There are several ways to make waves, but the typical ones are using either acrylic gloss gel, or woodland scenics water effects. I chose the woodland scenics product as it was fairly well reviewed online and I even found a nifty youtube video on how to apply it. Simply put, you squeeze it on, and then trowel it out with a popsicle stick. It shrinks a lot when it dries, which can take several days or even weeks for thicker layers, but this helps to hide some of the popsicle stick marks so its not necessarily a bad thing.

So I applied it, and waited a few days, and was horrified.

Why? Because if you’re making large amounts of smooth waves, then there’s one significant issue: No matter what, when you push this stuff around with the popsicle stick, you will be getting air bubbles into it, not to mention those made just by troweling it out or squeezing it out of the container. With turbulent water this doesn’t matter, in fact it adds to the effect. But if you’re making smooth, gentle flowing water, then these air bubbles stand out in the waves. A LOT. And even though I was very careful in applying this stuff, if you have even a single air bubble every four or five waves, that’s still way too many, especially given the size of the area I was casting.

And yes, this had already been applied to the diorama base when I noticed it. Grrrr….

Queue three days of removing the water effects gel using rubbing alcohol and a scraper (which works but be gentle not to scratch the easily-damaged epoxy water!).

After this issue I did a bunch of tests. I took clear acetate and spread every known wave-making material I could get my hands on to see what it looked like when it went clear. I applied it as carefully as possible, agitating it as little as possible to get as little air into it as possible. I then let it dry a week.

I tested woodland scenic realistic water, their water effects, acrylic gloss gel, both medium and heavy, and modge podge gloss and supergloss.

Woodland scenic realistic water wouldn’t hold a wave shape no matter what. It’s not really intended to, it’s more for doing small streams of flat water.



Woodland scenic water effects traps and holds air bubbles, which become worse as it shrinks. This doesn’t matter if you plan to paint over it, or want to use it as a waterfall, but if you want clear waves, its terrible.



Liquitex acrylic gloss gel, both medium and heavy, have the exact same issue. No matter how careful I was, I wound up trapping air in the waves.



Modge podge supergloss is also useless. It reacted the same way as the woodland scenic liquid water, and wouldn’t hold a wave shape. In fact if I didn’t know any better I’d say they’re the same product. They’re even the exact same color.



Modge podge clear gloss: This worked! Air bubbles quickly rise to the surface, and need to be popped manually. It won’t hold large waves, but for gentle rippling of a moving river or stream it’s perfect! It only has one major issue. Anything thicker than a thin layer takes forever to dry normally. I’m talking on the order of weeks. I waited three weeks and there were still a half dozen waves that hadn’t gone clear. The online instructions say you can speed up the curing with heat and a low humidity environment. So that’s what I did. Using a rolling toolchest, and two brooms, I positioned my food dehydrator above the water, set it to 125 degrees, and left it for two days. By the end of day two if was clear and perfect. I sealed it with a little Tamiya clear green-tinted future floor wax, and voila, finally a good wave simulation, IMO!





So for those who have skipped down, or those doing searches for how to cast large areas of water, these are my tips:

1) Work in a clean, dust-free environment. Nothing is more irritating than a perfect coat of water with a couple of flakes of dust accidentally embedded in it.

2) For large areas of water, use epoxy resin. Yes, it will need to be layered, but it works beautifully, doesn’t shrink, and air bubbles can be removed fairly easy. Tint it with either envirotex’s own tints, or with Tamiya clear paints. Also, DO NOT try to degas it. This will only generate a huge amount of air bubbles you’ll never get rid of. Ask me how I know.

3) For waves, do NOT try texturing the resin itself. This can work in small areas or small streams, but IMO is not worth the risk, especially if you’re embedding a model in the water.

4) For large, turbulent waves or waves you plan to paint over with an opaque paint layer, you can use anything from woodland scenic water effects, to acrylic gloss media, it won’t make much different. But for smoother, flat ripples, use only modge podge. For the life of my I don’t know how you can get a clear, air-bubble-free result using anything else.

5) Speed up the drying of modge podge with a food dehydrator or something similar. Be very careful that it doesn’t get too hot though, so hair dryers or heat guns are not recommended. Otherwise expect it to take weeks to truly fully cure, depending on your temp and humidity.

6) Both modge podge, and epoxy resin are technically ‘soft’, and can’t be sanded well. When they’re dry, coat them with an acrylic varnish like future floor wax to protect them. That way you can later clean and dust your water without scratching it.

7) For smaller bodies of water like streams, puddles, and wells without much water movement, almost anything will work. The woodland scenic realistic water works well but takes a while to dry. This is what I used for some of the larger puddles in the diorama. Epoxy works well for this too. Theoretically urethane resin or polyester resin could work too but I honestly wouldn’t risk it unless you have nothing else you can use.

I do hope that anyone planning to cast water who stumbles across this reads it, takes it to heart and has a better experience than I did. I now feel like I can cast amost any size area of water, but on the other hand, given how frustrating doing so was, I’m not sure I ever want to again!

Jason,
Yikes!!! ... I hung onto every written word.

I have (or had) a relatively large water project in mind for an upcoming diorama and I've been researching water effects for a couple of months now — procrastinating the work ahead. After reading the above in-depth account of your experiences, I realize the process can be far more risky and expensive than I had imagined. Thank you for sharing this very useful information with landlubbers such as myself.

BTW, the dio looks great! Here's to your perseverance!

—mike

Thanks Mike!

Don't be too put off by water, just learn from my experience. If you want to do a large volume of transparent water, and particularly if you want to embed a model in it, then layer epoxy resin. If you want waves, use modge podge for smooth ripples, or acrylic gloss gel for heavy turbulence, just make sure not to work too much air into it as you sculpt it. Tint it much darker than you expect to need when measuring the epoxy in the cup. Cover it with anything to keep dust from settling into it as it cures.

If you do all of that, there's no reason it can't work for you the first time and be fairly inexpensive when doing so. But deviate from that, and well... things can go VERY badly, VERY fast. That's why I wrote up this post, so that others can learn from my mistakes.

Great stuff.

Absolutely amazing work! Very few times do you see consistent high level of quality across many different modeling types - figures, vehicles weathering, water dioarama. Well done!

Outstanding job!
I'm working on same model and your work will help me in finishing my project.

A distantly related Dragon Wagon photo:


Photo of Knuckey original prototype design for the Dragon Wagon tractor. WOW!

What a great picture! That's one heck of a big truck.