Ford F550 Super Duty Ambulance (Polk County)

Revell-Fan

Revell-Fan

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Howdee fans!

The firefighter theme has not let me go. After successfully submitting my firestation diorama to the honour brigade of Ottenstein @Rhaven Blaack asked me to repaint a Ford Ambulance car / truck model to honour the crew of his local fire fighter department of Polk County. He sent me some pictures of the car and a mini model of the Ford F350. However, upon closer inspection I found out that this model was so different from the Polk's that I decided to find some blueprints and build a completely new model. Since I only had five pictures of all sides and no other data I carefully examined the info given to find out which model it was. After determining the company (Ford) RB and I were scanning the web simultaneously, he from the US, I from Germany, and after 25 minutes of parallel research we settled on the model being an F550 Super Duty:

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It was more challenging to find some blueprints. Chris sent me into the right direction and I began working on the CG model.

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After some refinement the model was ready for cleanup and a first unfolding test.

It was a good idea to apply a preliminary texture made from the pictures because that revealed some major deviations between the CG model blueprints and the real thing. The box was too short and the aft wheels were in the wrong position. To find out how much the box was supposed to be stretched I took the tank neck as a base and kept stretching the box until the neck turned from a rectangle into a square.

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Then I moved the wheels and wheel boxes further to the back until they matched the position in the pictures.

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The right side sits deeper than the left. I added a step at the bottom to make that work.

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The F550 is available in different configurations. Some have a running tunnel, others like this particular one have a viewing tunnel. I added the connections between the box and the driver's cabin accordingly:

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In theory box and cabin are simply plugged together. We'll see if that works as planned. ;)

When I checked the cabin I noticed even more deviations. Stretching the box and adding a step were a piece of cake compared to what I saw on the nose. The drawing and the picture did not match at all. The white stripes were not interrupted by the front fenders and the front itself was much too far out. So I moved the front axle forward till it met the front edge and pushed and pulled the fenders into shape. After getting there I re-modeled the fenders to get a clean mesh. Everything looked much better then.

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As a side effect I was able to re-model the bumper which now looked much closer to the original and which was much easier to build. The downside of this endeavour was that I had to unfold the complete front and side again. Ah well. I am glad that I have fixed the issues at this early stage. Things would have been much more difficult if I had noticed them during the test build. ;)

Since the pictures Rhaven supplied to me were excellent I chose to use as much of them as a texture. Nothing beats the original and there is no need to improve perfect source material. Major kudos to the photographer! :)

To make the pictures work I had to remove the shadows and even out the colour. Pretty simple bucket-fill and pencil-stroke ops in Gimp. Perspective was corrected on-the-fly, too, using the grid-transformation tool.

However, something odd happened when I imported the cleaned up images in Corel. The colours shifted and turned from a deep fire red into a lighter orange red:

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Left the original, right THE SAME (!) picture imported in Corel. I have absolutely no idea why this is happening. I'll fix that later when the template is complete.
 
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WOW!!!
THANK YOU VERY MUCH for tackling this project! It is GREATLY APPRECIATED!
This looks AMAZING, thus far! I am really looking forward to building this. I am certain that the guys at the fire station will really like this!
 
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Thank you all for your comments! I just noticed that the front window frame is a bit too thick, so once again back to the drawing board today. I think the problem can be solved by moving the front window frame a bit closer to the back of the cabin. ;)
 
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You are a SketchUp master!
I really need to sit down and learn the program properly. There is so much I want to design, but my skill set is way to low.

Great work RF!
 
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Thank you very much! :)

The pictures RB supplied are very good but the only thing which is really hard to see is the hood. There are several recognizable "folds" in it which I want to replicate to give the model more character.

The first version which you already know featured no details:

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Switching back and forth between the front and side views made me experiment with different configurations. Here is one:

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You can see in which direction this is going, however, the folds are too pronounced here. If you build the hood like this it would not look formed but broken. So back to the drawing board.

I had extreme difficulty finding good references because I was constantly looking for the car model. Doing so I got a bazillion of pictures of the vehicle in all of its glory but none was showing good views at the hood. Then I accidentally added "hood" to the search parameters which gave me what I was looking for. This was a big facepalm moment! :hammerhead:

Ah well. After some fudging I ended up with this:

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I think this is not all too bad. I'm now refining the shape and will give you an update asap. Stay tuned! :)
 
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Now it was time to check the overall dimensions on the whole vehicle. I turned the right half into a component, duplicated and mirrored it. This is how it looks in perspective view compared with an image of a black Super Duty I found in the web:

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Small refinement:

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Almost there! :)
 
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