Jim,
Can you possibly explain how you made those awesome rolls using tissue on that spectacular M20 on your site? Thanks!

Tin - I use Kleenex tissue. My favorite method is the tape a sheet of Kleenex to a scrap piece of cardboard, with double-sided tape. I airbrush the Kleenex flat black first, then I overspray that with a "cloud pattern" of Khaki, or whatever color I want my eventual roll to be. I vary this color a lot, since the gear on a vehicle doesn't age or weather in concert with the vehicle. Sometimes, this gear is replaced outright, when lost on patrol or maneuver.

After the Kleenex dries, I then cut out swaths. I vary the widths too - 1 1/2-inches to 2 inches depending on the roll I'm trying to make. I tri-fold the swath - taking the cut ends and folding them towards the center of the swath.

Then I take a spare spray bottle with a spraymaker head - just any old squirt bottle will do. I use a 50-50 white glue/water mixture. Wet the swath with the spraymaker head.

Then I take an end of the swath and roll it with my fingers. When rolled completely, I tie off the ends with black thread, and sit the roll aside to dry overnight.

Variations on this theme is using two Kleneex tissues or wider swaths - to increase the thickness of the roll - like for a blanket. Making a thicker (30-70) white glue/water solution - to make a smoother roll, like nylon tarps for modern vehicles. And even skipping the pre-painting stage altogether. Make the roll as above, let dry overnight, airbrush flat black or flat brown over the entire roll - this will become your shadow coat in all the cool nooks and crannies, and then overspray with the color you want your roll to be.

After all of this, I hit the centers and edges of the roll with a lighter color of the base coat I selected for the roll - as a sunfaded highlight.

Whatever method you select to make the roll, and paint it, it will remain pliable for about three days as room temperature, which allows you to form it when you mount it on your model. Lastly, when completely dry, you may want to go back and drybrush it - which really makes some of the folds and creases pop out.

Gunnie

Thanks Gunnie, that's awesome!

Great job Gunnie! Tin Can beat me to the same question. I checked out your photos in the Gallery, even showed them to my wife and son. Great job again.

Humble appreciation Sir!

Gunnie

Gunnie, I tried out the procedure as you have it outlined above (minus painting to save time) and it works awesome! Thanks!

Allllright - I'm glad it worked out for you!

Gunnie

Hi GunTruck
I use the almost the same process, but I didn´t paint it first I put the water + Glue first and let it dry then I roll and paint as desired...
I´ll try you process on my next project...
Regards

Gunnie,
I tried it out and here are the results. The only thing I did different is paint the tissue afterwards because I didn't feel like breaking out the airbrush. I made the 'straps' with 3M post-it notes painted flat brown (XF-10) and cut into strips and attached with super glue. Thanks again for the help gunnie.

The pics are here.

Tin - I wasn't able to access the page - is it still available?

Gunnie

Ok, think i fixed it. Thanks.

Howdy Gunnie and all,
I was going to start a whole new Forum simply called 'GunTrucks' where we could continue to ask questions and post info regarding gun trucks & more specifically gun truck modeling in general since the other two forum titles were a little 'off on their own'. But after rereading your post above about scratchbuilt blanket and tarp making, I thought this would be as good a place as any to start asking questions (my questions anyway) since I think your post is well worth rereading by everyone. Anyway, enough of the 'butter', and on with my questions.

Before I start, you need to know that you are responsible for this new direction of mine!
I was just cruisin' along, happy as a lark, building my tank models, minding my own business when what happens to invade my comfortable mantra? GunTruck's! Yeah, that's right, gun trucks. So now I'm on this crusade to learn all I can about gun trucks. Read the book by Tim Kutta. Good book, nice condensed bit of guntruck history, and some really good pictures. From which I have learned that there indeed was a guntruck that was equiped with the XM-134 General Electric miniguns! Several in fact.
Which brings me to my first question (about time huh?) After reading through the book I am thinking of starting off with building the guntruck dubbed 'The Untouchable'. Not only does it have my idea & desire for use of miniguns, but it also has what looks like a managable build up consisting of straight armour plated sides and no fancy cab things going on. I also like the idea they had of carrying a full set of replacement tyres in the back for spares in case of an ambush shooting out a full side set or something. Plus the tyres, being quite visible in the rear of the truck would add additional character to the finished model!
I would like to use either of the two AFV truck kits as the 'core' truck itself, and scratchbuild the armour plating from sheet for both the cargo bed & the cab, and add the XM-134 minigun set from Legends and a the M2 Browning .50 Cal.'s from Verlinden or something.

So, what does everyone think of this plan? Main question is would the AFV kits work as the best base kit for the project? Some other manufacturer? All input would be greatly appreciated since this will be my very FIRST truck of any kind.

Thx, Tread. :-)

Well Tread - first off, "THE UNTOUCHABLE - Only the Strong Survive" was built around the M54 5-ton truck chassis. You know there isn't a M54 series truck done in 1:35 scale - completely or presently. If you're willing to do a lot of work to get to the M54 - then there are some things you'll need along the way:

Real Models produces a M54 Cab Conversion for the Italeri M923 series of 5-ton trucks. The frame and suspension of the Italeri kit is close enough to those used in the M54 that it won't cause heartburn to use. Their M54 Cab Conversion is based on the AFV Club Deuce, replacing sheetmetal where appropriate for the larger M54. I took the same approach that they did - so either they're brilliant - or we're both dead wrong! At any rate, cleaning up the resin and getting it together is moderately quicker than scratchbuilding your own like I did.

From the Italeri truck kit, you'll also use the cargo bed. Get rid of all the modern fixtures on the walls of the cargo bed - it's relatively easy to backdate to a good approximation of the M54 cargo bed. Eventhough Italeri got the wooden floor detail wrong in their modern truck - you'll be ignoring it anyway to model a gun truck like this one.

The weakest detail of the Italeri kit is the soft rendering of the standard 5-ton truck tires. Real Models produces a very nice set of standard 5-ton truck tires that are easy to fit to the Italeri axles.

The Fighting Compartment is really simple in comparison to all the above. We already mentioned that you can get the XM-134 Mini-Guns from Legend Productions, and there are plenty of .50cal MG's available aftermarket to suit your fancy. Spare Ammo cans can be had from either Verlinden or Legend Productions too.

Hope this gets you started Tread - and I LIKE your idea about breaking this out into a separate Gun Truck thread or Forum...

Gunnie

Great job explaining your tarp method. I was also wondering how you do it so I guess it was just a matter of time. I think the post explains how to make them perfectly, but I would like to suggest you take a couple pictures next time and write a short article for the features section. In a couple months when this thread is several pages back, I am sure the question will come up again and again. I know its easy for me to ask you to do it and much more work for you to actually do it, but I thought I would just make a suggestion. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.

Thanks Andrew - and I'll start taking more pictures to begin writing short articles...

Gunnie

The set of replacement tires on the back of several gun trucks in a neat story. Since the guntrucks did not exist officially, their existence depended on the commander of the 8th Brigade and the various truck units. At times, directions from higher headquarters tried to put an end to the gun trucks. The guntruckers were resourceful. As the story goes, they simply added several tires to a small section in the rear of the truck and called them maintenance contact trucks. I gues you can contact pretty well with .50 caliber machine guns. Tim :-)

Many thanks for the input Tim. Always appreciate advice from an expert! Read your book on gun trucks and got the info from there saying the guntruckers carried them as replacements. Never considered the other angle about the 'maintenace contact' premise.

As I stated in the above post, I am planning on building 'The Untouchable' and have received excellent marching orders from Gunnie regarding how best to proceed in the actual hands-on building of the kit. I was wondering if you had any more pics of that particular gun truck, or had any other other information (maybe something that didn't make it into your book ).

Mnay thx, Tread.

P.S. Tim, did you get my PM regarding your Gun Truck book??

Ohh, BTW. If you have a 'PM' or Personal Message, there will be a small silver & red box in the upper left corner of the home page here. Right above the colourful flags.

Didn't know if you knew or not

Tread.

I don’t know if it has been mentioned before or not, the US Army Transportation Museum ( http://www.eustis.army.mil/DPTMSEC/museum.htm ) at Fort Eustis has a gun truck display and a web history of gun trucks. Convoy Operations in Vietnam: Gun Trucks - The Hardened Convoy Concept http://www.eustis.army.mil/DPTMSEC/MUSEUM/convoy_operations.htm .

On the Discount Models site is a article by James Lyles on how he made a M-54 (HOW I MADE AN M-54 VIETNAM ERA 5-TON http://www.discountmodels.com/gallery_Eve.htm ) can’t vouch much for this accuracy. I remember the 5t cab being bigger than the 21/2t cab.

QUAD 50 ( http://personal2.iddeo.es/cmt/quad/quad_start.html ) has gun trucks and shows how the quad system was mounted into the truck bed.

Found these sites from the links page ( http://www.eustis.army.mil/DPTMSEC/MUSEUM/good_sites.htm ) of the Transportation Museum:

http://communities.msn.com/VietnamGuntrucks/_whatsnew.msnw

http://www.kkreate.com/par/index.htm


Dave

Jim Lyles did a very good job on "Eve of Destruction" - better than most efforts I've seen in gun truck miniatures. His conversion effort is sound and he made the necessary changes to the AFV Club Deuce to enlarge it to the M54.

Gunnie

Thanks for the info on the message function guys. Just found it and its pretty neat. Let me see if there are anymore Untouchable pictures in the collection here. Tim :-)

Put simply Gunnie, you're indispensible! Can't thank you enough for the 'silver platter' edition of M54 GunTruck building 101. I will be using your suggested method to build 'The Untouchable'.
In fact I stopped by Colpar (my local hobby store) and picked up Italeri Kit # 284 / M-925 U.S. Army Standard 5t Truck. Is this the kit I should get to base my 'Untouchable' on??
Also picked up some .020 sheet styrene for the plate armour. Yeah, yeah, I know. A little too thick (.020 = 3/4" plate in 1/35th scale), but .015 and smaller seemed too flimsey
So, Gunnie, before I get long-winded here is the Italeri kit I got the one you suggested?


Tread.

Yep - that's the kit you'll get a good start from. It already has the standard 5-ton tires - if you decided not to splurge on the resin replacements from Real Models. Don't worry too much about the .020" styrene sheet. This is your first conversion - be comfortable with what you choose to use and have fun! There are a hundred more gun trucks ahead of you to build

Gunnie

Thanks Gunnie, really appreciate the 'hand-holding' here.
BTW, I checked over at the Legends site to scope out the XM-134 addendum kit and saw that they have a guntruck kit that looks a lot like 'The Untouchable'. Interesting.
I will probably get the resin tyres anyway since I'll need an extra set of them. After taking a closer look at the 'gun pit' (is that the right word?) area, thanks to sas's guntruck gallery (thanks Russ ) I'm going to need extra help in building the special mounting pintles that hold the miniguns. I'll be calling on you soon Gunnie!

Tread.

Also, another question. Did the 'big rigs' , the tractor trailers which were also armed and armoured, have names??
Ya know, a guntruck the size of a Kenworth 18 wheeler would be a fantastic 'fantasy' version of a guntruck, wouldn't you think??

Uh Oh......now I've gone and done it........planted another seed. Gunnie's gonna be mad at me now! Maybe I should change my name from Tread to Johhny Appleseed?

:-)