Hi All
I have got this one un-stalled. The hang up was how to do the basket. I actually made three of the dam things with each one being better and more appropriate than the last and that does not count the failed effort of weaving one out of coaxle wire. If I had to carry on making them the tenth one would take a quarter of the time and be four times better than the first. The biggest hang up was finding the right material for the weave effect. I had up until now used an umbrella that worked very well but this has since disappeared, possibly because the missis went to use it and saw lots of seat shaped holes cut into it and chucked it. Finding something as good was a chore, I went down to a haberdashery shop and bought loads of different remnants only to find none of them worked. The problem was the watered down paint soaked evenly into the material thus not showing the weave effect. I then by chance was given a rally coat at work as a gift and told it cost £150 (so I hope they do not read this) I was the right colour and made of nylon so this should surly work – it didn’t. I then thought I would try putting a waterproof agent on it and voila! It worked perfectly. Heavily watered down acrylic brown just sank and rested in the crevices drying to good effect. So with that part sorted here’s how I did the whole thing:
The box centre is just .25mm plastic card glued into an open cube with a few extra layers on the bottom. The ribs or fat bits or whatever you want to call them are a mix of x2 thin copper fuse wires twisted together in a drill and x4 thin wires done the same. These are then glued around the box in all the appropriate places. Once all the copper is on I painted the whole thing in light beige. Inside the basket I put eight super long turn buckles, this is not present in any basket I have seen and is one of those compromises between what is real and what works when construction something, the rigging will be attached to these. Once a large section of the coat material had been painted I put tracing paper on the basket and marked out the pattern, transferred it to the coat and cut out all the little pieces. These were white glued in place around the basket. I noticed on pictures the interior appears to be lined with a darker material; I assume this is untreated linen. I copied this by cutting some tracing paper to shape and white gluing it inside. The nice thing about doing it this way is the tracing paper crinkles into something that naturally looks like a sheet of linen. This I then painted brown along with the see thru bits around the basket. I painted some fishing line dark beige and cut dozens of short lengths off and white glued them into the see thru bits as they are in the real thing. I have noticed a few ropey bits having seen the photos that I will clean up and having now built it I found out the arrangement underneath the basket is wrong, the twisty bits should go corner to corner but I am not going to start another one just for that.
Time to do the passengers, I may do just one to save time but they are 1/72 Airfix WWI German infantry figures to which I will do some minor surgery.
Thanks for looking in, Alan.
