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I’ve not actually measured this model up but it does look about right size-wise. I’ve read somewhere online this particular Dinky model is roughly 1:43 too. I got this one cheap as it has bits missing and broken. As a side bonus it still had its ladder though which is now living on my much better condition Dinky Merryweather. I decided to find a better chassis donor for this one instead of using the Dinky one. This battered 1:43 Deutz/Iveco came up for not much so I bagged that. Next I wanted the Dinky cab, so that got chopped off the donor. Its actually quite a nice casting once you clean it up. The hardest part about this project was building the cab rear wall section. Using a fire engine as a donor basically leaves you starting with nothing! As often is the case with projects like this the hardest part is figuring out how to start. Ive used various sized plastic tube section cut up as needed and plastic sheet for the rest. It’s not an easy shape to make though as there’s various curves, pressed in shapes and a slight taper to the cab too.

The Taekno D series is a really nice model, as you say though, not often found cheap. Theres a few versions of that IXO Leyland Comet. Ones a tanker and the others a high sided type flatbed. I’m quite tempted to be honest! Ive just had a Quick Look at the Beattie kits on the website. Some nice kits on there although I couldn’t find anything about an Ergomatic. I’ve done a conversion of a Dinky Ergomatic cab…

With the trunk lid glued down it looks fine. I repainted the black moulded interior in a nice period colour with a few extra details picked out. Interestingly (or not!?) they actually got this one wrong. In the movie the car is a dark blue not black as the model is.

Last one for now!! Another car from the Bond partwork is the Lincoln Continental. There’s actually three versions available, a standard sedan like this one and two limo’s, one convertible and a hard top. The sedan though is the one that was crushed in the movie and the model is modelled with the trunk lid open. It does annoy me a bit when they make them like that as it really limits the appeal of the model. Luckily though it’s pretty easy to put right! Once opened up the trunk lid is just a simple moulded plastic part riveted to the inside of the body. Just drill off the rivet heads and release the lid. Also push out the luggage as it stops the trunk lid closing properly afterwards. Here’s the lid. When it comes off there’s a plastic ‘hinge’ type bit near the rivet holes which I just sliced off. Trial fitting it showed it’s not quite the right shape so some careful sanding is required around the sides and back. Eventually it will fit in pretty nicely. I had to glue some scraps of plastic card under the corners to pack it out to the correct height. On this car I wanted to try to keep the factory paint finish intact, but if your repainting it you can use plastic and filler to get an even better fit.

Here’s various interiors all being painted and rhd swapped. Some are really easy to swap to rhd, others though are an absolute nightmare! Some, like the Sierra have parts of the dashboard that are angled towards the driver, so face to the left. Obviously when you swap to rhd it means you need to cut the dash to bits and rearrange everything to face to the right. Fortunately though being still a fairly small scale the interiors aren’t all that easy to see when the cars are reassembled so you can get away with so much! Lots of the Bond in motion partwork cars also come with figures, like these gun wielding gentlemen. I don’t always fit figures to mine but with a bit of modification these are all reusable as drivers and passengers should you need to fit them.

The F100 mentioned above starts off in a metallic blue, but I opted to go for a very 80’s metallic black look. The cab unit is normal diecast but the rear pickup body, oddly, is moulded plastic. No idea why they did that but whatever. I painted it all, shined it up nice then had an accident and ruined it! I picked up a can of another colour for another car, shook the can to mix it and somehow a jet of paint/propellant shot out from under the nozzle and landed directly on the F100! Nowhere else!! Unfortunately, despite my best efforts and harsh language it dissolved the fresh black paint and meant I had to strip it and start over. Loosely assembled and waiting to be reassembled. The light bar in the bed is a leftover from another project, but it suits this Ford!

Thanks! Theres no trade secrets or anything here!😄 I don’t consider myself a master modeller or anything, all this is pretty simple stuff anyone can do. It’s just having the desire to start that’s all!

After paint & reassembly.

A pair of US Ford next. Argentina partwork again. Ones an 81 F100 the others an 82 F150. The F150 starts off as a weird looking box body ambulance in army livery. It doesn’t look great to me so I took the box body off and decided to build something else onto it instead. ‘Something’ turned out to be a classic American style utility truck. Nothing available for that so plastic card and scratch building it is! All just done from photos and cobbled together from plastic section or sheet built directly onto the truck’s original plastic chassis. I repainted the black plastic interior in tan for this one.

The front bumper needs filling too in the centre depression. Primer. Always the point where you then find bits you missed! Then paint. I chose Ford ceramic blue for this. Which seemed a common choice on many lower spec Fords of the mid 80’s, Sierra’s, Escort’s, Fiesta’s all used the colour. That’s as far as I got with this one. I like to paint them then leave them to harden for a while before messing around with them as I find the paint can chip easily when reassembling.

Another partwork car meets the razor saw! These Ford Sierra’s are all from the memorable cars partwork from Argentina. Not quite up to the spec of a Vanguard’s model but still good, and they cost a lot less. All three versions are available here. I’ve got a good few of each type including a damaged L hatchback (yellow car). As they come, they are actually South American Sierra’s so do have a few details that aren’t right for European cars. This varies between each model, but generally the front bumpers need altering as the South American cars had a depression in the centre for an extra radiator slot. The estate has the hideous US spec front end which is totally wrong for a European car. But, it’s the only version of an estate… The plan then is to combine bits from both the damaged L spec hatchback and the estate to create a Ford Sierra L or GL estate. Chop the fronts off! Then glue the L front onto the estate. It goes without saying that doing this requires accurate marking of both models otherwise getting the two parts to fit together is a pain! Once the glue had set after 24 hours it seemed strong enough so I did the right thing and packed a load of chemical metal putty into the join under the bonnet making sure it clears the chassis. The joint was visible of course so I used filler primer to layer over the join then repeatedly wet flatted it down until the join wasn’t visible. Also as I’m modelling a low spec car the roof bars all need removing, the strips on the roof filing down and holes filling.

Thanks Terry! Im a fair bit younger than you (born in 84!) but I love road vehicles! Not so much modern stuff but things from the 80’s back really. I’ve got a few classic cars too so doing the models seemed an obvious choice for modelling.

Started painting it. I decided to go for an ARC style livery. Overall I’m well happy with how it came out. Considering it’s a complete lash up of bits and pieces! Still to do are transfers, I’ve got some ARC ones somewhere. And the front wheel centres need alternating as I don’t think we were allowed that type of rim design here? It needs standard single piece wheels really. That old Dinky cab is actually an impressive little casting considering its age and toy origins! Yes, the front needs chopping but apart from that it comes up well. Only thing I would have done better is fix the various chips and dents it had in various places from its life as a toy getting battered about. Some around the windscreen made it look a bit untidy when I started painting the details. The rear mud guards need straightening out too.

So now we have the basic truck. I had to make up a new cab floor to support the metal cab, and as a bonus I managed to reuse to original Dinky mounting! Some extra’s need adding. Many of these old cement mixers used a separate pony engine to drive the mixer and pump water so I built this up from scraps. On real ones, some actually used what looks suspiciously like the entire front section of a small tractor! Added a few details to the mixer including the water pipe to the back for a washout hose. Starting to look a bit more complete now!

Although there are some British trucks available I was a bit frustrated at the lack of some of the most common types in this scale, so I started looking into ways to get myself something suitable. The Ford D series was a very very common truck from the 60’s onward yet the only thing I can find that fits the bill is the ancient Dinky one. Apparently it scales out to more or less 1:43 so that’ll do! But it’s not without its problems. The worst of which is that cab front. If you look at it side on the front grill and panel stick out too far giving it a bull nose look. In reality they’re much flatter. After carefully marking up with tape I sliced the nose off my donor cab and removed slices of metal until I was happy. I think the bull nose look is a hangover from the original version of this model with opening doors as they needed extra space to cast the hinges in. Next was decide on a rear body. I picked up a partwork Berliet cement mixer cheap so decided to use the chassis and body as a basis. With the Berliet cab removed you can see the length ‘issue’ that needs addressing! This is one of the problems going from a conventional bonnet cab to a cab-over. After lots of butchery and trial & error. The chassis needed some significant work but came good in the end.

Here’s my first conversion of one of those FG trucks I mentioned. As it comes the FG is a great little truck. You could quite easily leave it as is and display it, or do a bit of detailing and use it on a layout. But I went a bit further with one of mine. They were very common trucks here for everything from delivering bread, construction use and all sorts. So I’ve done mine as a beaver tail recovery truck. As it comes the chassis is very short being a tipper version. If you added a suitable length bed onto it the rear axle looks completely in the wrong place! If you loaded a car onto a real one like that you’d end up doing wheelies in the truck! So the chassis needs cutting and extending. I just used some spare bits of nickel silver angle sections. The rear bed came from a different truck I already had but it wouldn’t be difficult to make something similar in plastic card. I had to add a couple of frame extensions to get it to sit on the chassis right. Mock up. As I mentioned the cab on this model is the Spanish built version which has a couple of extra rows of radiator slots on the front the UK trucks didn’t have. You can see them being filled in in this pic. On this one I couldn’t remove the wheels as there was so much glue holding them on! They’d have broken so I had to mask them for painting. Painting in progress. I swapped it to rhd too which is easy on these.

Here’s the Volvo & low loader trailer. Needs a bit of work and more suitable paint job but you could definitely see trucks like this here from the 70’s onwards. Weirdo choice next! A RABA. From a Hungarian truck partwork I think. Ok, RABA trucks weren’t available here, or if they were they’d be in tiny tiny numbers, but look at the cab. Look familiar? RABA used cabs from other manufacturers for a long time. Earlier ones used DAF cabs but later they went to using MAN cabs like this one, which we did get here in good numbers from the 80’s onwards.

That is one drawback to repainting these models, it’d be nice if someone made a custom decal set for the badges. Some aren’t too bad to at least make a suggestion of them being there, like Ford badges being an oval of blue paint for example but I’m definitely not going to try hand painting ‘Commer’ across the front of that van!😄 The IXO Bedford TK is a lovely model. Unfortunately I missed out on the two versions I know of (circus rigid & Dinky artic). But there’s quite a few trucks from IXO and the partwork collections that are very British or foreign makes suited to British roads… BMC/Leyland FG. Quite a common one this, but it’s actually the version built under license in Spain, so it has two extra grill slot rows on the front. I’ve done a conversion of one of these I’ll post up later! Thames ET6, again a Spanish built version called EBRO over there but pretty much the same truck. This bottle truck version can be picked up new quite cheaply at the moment. I’ve got a pair of them for eventually body swapping the backs on. Bedford TJ. This one’s a bit harder to track down, but is a lovely model. You could simply remove the French writing on this, swap it to right hand drive and call it good and it’d look right at home on an O gauge model. Austin FFK. This one’s quite tricky to find. Part of the Spanish working vehicles partwork. Needs a rear body conversion to look more like a British truck but, again, a really lovely model. I had to get this one from Spain, absolutely none available over here! There’s this absolute beast too! Leyland Super Hippo, from the same collection as the FFK above. Most of these trucks were for export as they were very well suited to heavy haulage and use in mining and lumber industry. South Africa, Oz, Spain etc etc all had them. Some are even still working there. But they were operated in smaller numbers over here too. They made excellent heavy recovery trucks. Something smaller maybe? Ford Transit ‘smiley’ from the same collection as the FG. These aren’t available over here but can be picked up from European suppliers. These are absolutely ripe for rear body conversions… I’ll show one I’ve started later! Being for a Spanish collection it’s an air con fitted van as it’s got the extra little grill on the wing. Something that needs filling really for a UK van! Swedish trucks became popular here so, Volvo F88, available in numerous forms including tractor units, dropsides and box trucks. As well as this I’ve got a pair of the IXO branded tractor unit versions, one of which I intend to repaint for use with a low loader trailer.

I did say I like to jump around from project to project!! Part of the reason is, because I’m moving house soon I don’t always have access to all my paints, tools etc and even workspace, so sometimes it’s a case of doing what I can when I can. I’m hoping once moved and settled I can actually get more seen through to the finish. For now though this has to do. Anyway, I used to work for SSE as a high voltage maintenance engineer, being a petrol head of course I got quite into the vans we used and the ones the company, in its public ownership days, used in the decades before. One of which was the Dodge 50 van. Unfortunately I can’t find a model of one in 1:43 but one of my favourite big vans, and one that was very very common in this country, and the predecessor to to the Dodge 50 is available… The Commer/Dodge Walkthru van. This one is available from some Spanish partwork collection of working vehicles. This is the latest version of it as it comes, next to the much older Triang Spot-On version. Bimbo bread and cakes livery! Southern Electricity as it was at that time used these big vans in good numbers for years, so this one’s days of delivering bread in Spain are now over and it’s going to become a utility van in Blighty! I didn’t actually realise the roof section was plastic and came off like this until I stripped it down. The roof and chassis look like they’re intended to be interchangeable with other parts to make a high roof van or a chassis cab version. Masking removed and left to dry. Ive just bought some water slide transfer paper to try making some branding decals for this.

Here’s an icon of the world’s roads! The Lada Riva! Available as a Belarus police car. Obviously not very British looking but it’s a lovely model. Fill the roof light bar holes… Painted in authentic blue paint (the name of which escapes me…) it looks much more like a car you’d find on UK roads.

I’m massively into American cars too, and there’s a lot of scope here in the partworks too! Bond in motion Plymouth Savoy taxi. Definitely a car that looks amazing in actual colours.

By now I’d been amassing quite the collection of 1:43 scale vehicles, mostly from the various partwork magazine collections available over the years. It’s a real shame we Brits seem so poorly served by the magazine companies for these. In Europe and South America in particular there’s loads of them available. If you look for them you can start finding all sorts of awesome vehicles, very familiar to UK roads. The way they’re made also lends them to swapping bits & bobs between them to create custom cars. This is another Bond Taunus altered to become a Cortina. Resprayed beige with a few panels in different colours to look like rotten or damaged panels replaced with ones from scrap cars. The wheels are Capri pepper pot alloys taken from a Capri 2.8i model. I used these as Cortina’s and indeed other old cars at that point in their lives often had bits from other models added to jazz them up a bit. Just needs a few more details painted in, then I’ll weather it a bit with rusty patches, black patches of MOT welding on the sills etc. Here’s the Capri I robbed the wheels from, now wearing a set of basic steel rims from a Taunus TC3/Cortina mk5. This Capri will eventually become a lower spec model - hence the steel wheels. This is another partwork car… as are all those behind it! And the Taunus TC3/Cortina mk5, now wearing the Ghia alloys from the Bond Cortina mk4!

So by now I was happy to start trying painting and messing about with mor model like vehicles, which is more my interest really than restoring the old toys. So, being a Ford lover I bought a few 1:43 Ford Taunus TC2 models from the Bond in motion magazine partwork collection. Intention here was to turn them into a more British Cortina mk4, which isn’t too hard as they’re essentially exactly the same cars! Stripping these newer models down takes more effort and you’ve got to be careful you don’t break things or damage the glazing as they’re riveted in place and need drilling out. It’s pretty much inevitable something will break on them though as it seems very hit or miss how much glue the factory used to hold the various bits on with. Some come apart nice and easy but others are an absolute pig! For this particular one, I sprayed it in Roman bronze metallic, followed by clear lacquer. This is where I should mention that I’m one of those annoying people that will start a project or ten then haphazardly jump around from one to another as the fancy takes me! So this one is sat on my bench waiting to be finished… Here’s another one the same in progress being detailed. These are a great model of the Taunus TC2/Cortina mk4 though. I’ve got quite a few of them now either in progress being painted or sat in a box waiting.

I got a Dinky Volvo 265 cheaply on eBay (I felt sorry for it!). It’s been painted awfully and had a wheel swap for much older spun wheels. Stripped it to bare metal. That red paint someone had put on was awful. It dissolved in the paint stripper and turned into a runny red mess. It looked like a murder scene after I’d finished! Some of these Volvo’s have a casting defect in a couple of places depending on when they were made. Mine had this poor shaping to one front wing. With that filled and corrected as best I could, it was paint time. I did it in silver, painted the interior black and found some replacement wheels for it that suit it better in my opinion (from a dead Dinky Transit).

I tried something different with this one. Which almost worked! An old Corgi Buick Regal in 1:36 scale. This one was the Superman police car version. Bare metalled it, replaced a door as the hinge had snapped off, then filled the roof holes. Primer then first colour. Here’s where a bit of experimenting comes in! I used some nail art stickers as a masking aid. It actually took me ages to find something star shaped but in the right sort of size and type. More paint applied. Let it dry then the idea was to simply pick off the nail art stars leaving the base white colour star shapes behind. It almost worked but unfortunately the nail art stuff is extremely sticky and they peeled the paint off entirely in places. A shame, but it’s only a practice piece, so onward! Red stripes painted on, to give a unique finish!! As I say, it’s only for practice and it did kind of work out ok so I might finish this one. I can touch up the stars easy enough and it’ll still look ok. It was a good test of masking things up.