Zealot

One of our tenants is a retired fire fighter. This gave me the idea to make a fire engine for him as a present for his birthday. On http://www.streetpaper.de/ (Police > Bremen) I found a nice-looking fire truck model which I chose to build.

This vehicle is filed under

Mercedes Benz Actros
Hilfeleistungslöschfahrzeug (aid fire truck) HLF 16/12
Feuerwehr (fire brigade of) Bremen



Unfortunately there are no instructions available, so I'll have to rely on pictures of the real thing and pictures of a finished and enhanced model on kartonbau.de and see how far my intuition will take me. It seems that this thread will be the first complete build report on this model. ;)

I turned the plans into *.pngs to change two things: The light blue windows looked a bit unrealistic. I recoloured them and made them dark grey. Second, I enlarged the plans by 40% to print them on A3 size. Since the original design is 1/43 the new scale is about 1/30 now.

DSCF7083.JPG

I re-arranged a few parts to avoid visibe seam lines on the front and back compartment. I left the line on the undercarriage because you won't see it if you don't display it upside down. ;)

DSCF7086.JPG

One thing that took me completely off-guard: I had major printing problems with Gimp. The red came out inconsistently, the scale of a few pages was completely off. I checked everything three times, made several test prints and wasted a few pages for nothing. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. I restarted the PC, checked the resolution and colour values, nothing helped. Then I tried something else. I loaded the pages on a canvas in Corel and printed them with Corel. That helped. Scale and colours were perfect. It was the first time Gimp let me down this way. Strange.