Just a few photos to show where I am with this build.
As you can see in the photo above, I had a go at chipping the chassis so that the primer underneath would show through. There's a little touching up to do where I've gone through to the plastic, but I'm quite happy with the results so far.
As a side note, I was unable to confirm if WWII-era German trucks were primed with the same red-oxide as tanks and so forth, but in this case assumed they were. On various forums no one seemed to be able to answer this question, so who's to doubt my judgement? lol I don't think actual red oxide would be so brown, but hey, it works for me.
I opted to paint the ends of my bumpers white after much deliberation. I really wanted this little detail to begin with, but the problem was, my research found grey painted vehicles were most commonly adorned with them. So began the long search, in which I trawled through thousands of vintage photos until finally, I managed to find evidence that a few dark yellow painted vehicles did in fact have these markings.
The wooden cab looks horribly clean. I'll be dealing with that soon. The only work done has so far been on the chassis, and that's no where near complete. My research showed that this truck would have had 8 nuts holding the wheel on and not 6, but that's Italeri's research department's fault, and not mine. I could buy some after-market wheels, but for the cost I'd rather buy another kit.
The red cross - with such a simple design you would think it was a breeze for me to create, right? Wrong! I made some masks from thin card. I thought long and hard how to hold them in place, so as not to have any paint bleed. I did a test holding some card onto a sheet of plastic using white glue, and it worked a treat. Excitedly, I added all my masks to the truck, loaded the airbrush, and began misting on my paint. To cut a long story short, it was paint bleed central when the masks were removed. I've had to touch up the white and there's still a pink tint. This will hopefully be lost during the weathering process.
P.S. in my search for vehicles adapted to become field ambulances, I struggled to find any evidence of a white square in which to place my red cross, most being circular. This being said, I'm tenacious and my search eventually won through. Why did I not want circles? I had enough trouble with squares, so can you imagine cutting nice, neat circular masks?
Above are two examples of the half-dozen photos I found of Wehrmacht vehicles using the red cross emblem on a white square.
More soon..................
