Thinned the front wheel arches as scaling it up to full size the thickness would have been 99mm (4”). In fact the kit part is probably not far off the actual thickness of the real Matador wheel arch.
The cab detail is very sparse so I busied it up. It may not be 100% accurate as you probably won’t be able to see much when it’s all buttoned up….and it turns out I forgot to take a photo of the interior painted.
It probably would have been better to chose a four wheel Matador kit rather than the six wheel refueller, but that’s the only Matador kit I have so I shortened the chassis and altered the suspension. The leaf springs are resin copies from the Bedford QL.
And the craney bit. The cable is from a set of old in-ear headphones which had a very slender cable. Wasn’t easy stripping the plastic off but it’s perfect for the job.
From the photos it’s very difficult to see what the back of the vehicle actually looked like.
Now, this might need some explaining…. As you can see from the rear cargo thing (at the back of the photo) there is a space between the two storage lockers. At first I thought it was for the spare wheel….turns out it isn’t big enough. It must have been there for a reason and the photos aren’t clear enough to give any clues. A rummage though my drawers 😳 came up with a mysterious object which I cut into three parts and glued two of them in place (the grey bits) to give the impression there was something important going on down there, rather than a big empty space.
As with my last build I needed a jig to bend hoops for the cargo area. They aren’t the same as the Dromedary so I had to make a new jig. 55 is the length of the wire I needed in mm.
Incidentally, this isn’t my NUS (National Union of Students) card, it’s my daughters. If it was mine it would probably be made of Bakelite. 😄
The original photo shows a couple of fragile looking read mud guards. Remember when you were little more than a toddler and how you twirled bits of paper into curls using a ruler? That’s what I did on a strip of 0.25mm plastic. It worked okayish but the bend wasn’t tight enough so I wrapped it to be a much smaller diameter than I needed and dipped it in my tea – which is why the colour looks a bit jaundiced. Being British, all problems are solved by tea 😄 . When it cooled it opened a little to be more or less the correct radius. 🙂
From my extensive research (which translates as five minuets looking at photos on Google) wartime refuelling Matadors had only one headlight and there aren’t any in the kit. The one I’m building has two. Fortunately I had this in my spares box, the ends of which are ideal. 🙂
I fight against my inherited hoarding gene, but sometimes it works in my favour.
I chickened out fitting a cover to the cargo area on the Dromedary, I was determined I wasn’t going to on this. The original photo shows the tarp was fitted with straps, so I used Tamiya tape for those. Previously I’ve used tissue for covers/tarps etc. Being a one-trick pony I tried it again. My first mistake was using only a single ply tissue.
Here I’ve glued one side in place with superglue.
The other side didn’t go quite as well as a bit stuck to my thumb. Never fear, I repaired it with this patch. It’s important to tear around the edges which are supposed to blend in which it did perfectly when I swamped it with dilute PVA.
You’ll have to take my word for that because I forgot to take a photo.
What a plonker.
Incidentally, none of the photos I have show any sign of controls for the craney thing so I’m assuming it may have been controlled from the cab. The original photo I showed at the start is the only pic I have of it with the crane in operation and there is someone in the cab looking back, perhaps he’s taking instructions.
AEC Matador REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers)
Having done the Bedford QL from the 1/76 Airfix refuelling set I was left with an AEC Matador so after a short Googlalisation I saw a photo and the decision was made. 🙂
I found a few other photos of similar vehicles (some post war civvies) although the one thing all the photos had in common is that they are all a bit crap, so some the build will have to be ‘best guess’ AGAIN! The kit is from the dark ages when simple humans thought orange checked flares actually looked cool. As such, the kit is a bit simplified. Fortunately I’ll only be using the cab, chassis and wheels.
I first built the refuelling set only a few years after it was first released (although I wasn’t cool enough for the orange flares 🙁 ) and I suspect I’d have built and painted it on the day it was bought. This time it’s taken me three months. My younger self wouldn’t have been impressed. 😄
