I also did a couple of GMC CCKW army trucks at the same time. But you won't be interested in those because they are N-scale. However I plan to do a Z scale version in the future and also the Studebaker US6 truck as well.
After removing the scaffolding the first step is to check that the couplers and trucks fit OK. Here is a side by side shot with a MIcro-trains tank car. Note the huge difference in size! The ACF specs gives the tank diameter of a 7000 gallon car as 78 inches and mine measures out to 77 z-scale inches. The MT tank car measures out to 99 z-scale inches in diameter which is close to the 95 inch diameter of some 12,000+ gallon ACF cars. The lettering on the end of the MT tank car says "8029 gallons" which is clearly fantasy. The MT tank length is around 31 z-scale feet while mine is 28.
If you ever did them in n scale I'd be a buyer. One problem would be getting decals. Micro trains seems to have the same issue with their 8000 gallon N Scale tank car. The MT car is much larger than the Atlas 11,000 gallon car. I don't buy them anymore. Randy
Randy: I may do an N-scale after I finish the army trucks. I would have go back to the model again and add some additional details which were too small for Z. And since I can't print the rivets I would probably model one of the welded ones from the 1940s.
Stuff looks nice. What material are they printed in? The archer decals are great for rivets. They are a bit fiddly being so small, but they are manageable. Use a little Micro-sol after they dry and they adhere very nicely.
Yesterday I made the first attempt at printing the chassis for the Z scale CCKW truck, here it is next to it's big brother in N scale. Much of the finer details on the N scale model are lost when you go to Z such as the leaf springs and the fan blades on the engine. But how many other Z scale trucks even have an engine? The rear wheels are messed up, I need to go back to the model and make some adjustments.
Even though this was one of the first printings of this piece and had some flaws, I wanted to go through the entire building process to see if there were any gotchas lurking in the design. Didn't come out too bad for a first attempt. You can see one of the flaws in this next photo, where the lip at the top off the dome has snapped off when I removed the support. Making that lip slightly thicker was required.
Well that's disappointing, I wanted to upload a short video but the site does not like the AVI extension.
Starting a second car, a more recent printing with some improvements, after cleaning up the bumps left by the support pins and drilling out the holes for the couplers and bolster pins, I have attached the couplers and trucks and doing a test run.
This week I've been working on decals. My old ALPs printer died so I can not print white lettering. So I decided to go with a flashy silver and black paint job with black lettering on the silver part. I did a quick a dirty paint job on one of my "reject" prints just to give me an idea of how they will look. The sheet was printed on a new 1200 DPI color laser printer. The decals at the top of the sheet are for Studebaker trucks in Red Army service.
