While looking for pictures and info about the Hanomag K55 crawler tractor I found lots of cool video and other cool websites that I want to share with you.

Hanomag is(was) a german company, and they built almost everything: locomotives, trucks, tractors, cars, military vehicles, etc. For those of you interested in learning more about Hanomag, check this Wikipedia article.

Here you’ll find a few specifications about the Hanomag K55 crawler tractor. The site is still incomplete but it provides you with the basic specifications of this crawler tractor.
 

If you are a great vintage tractor fan, you might love this site, although in german, it’s very complete with a quite extensive list of makers, models, pictures and videos.

Here you’ll find a few videos from youtube.

Robust800′s youtube channel:

jochemgranit500′s channel:

TCTSD’s channel

SgtMaulwurf’s channel

Last but not least, I put all the videos of this scale model project together in one playlist, so it’s easier for you to find all related videos. Enjoy!

Here is the second part of Wiking’s Hanomag K55 crawler tractor in 1/25 scale. This time I’m adding more detail to the front grill.

First of all i had to cut the gas tank, hood and front grill in separate pieces as they were molded all together in one piece. Soon after starting cutting and shaping the model i realized that the plastic is very rigid and therefore breaks easily. Is not as flexible as the styrene used on traditional model kits (this is not kit! maybe they use a different plastic for this kind of “toys”… I don’t know)

The plastic is also very thick so I soon realized that it was not a good idea to cut each section of the front grill open and decided to cut the whole grill open after molding it on aluminum sheet.

Have a look at the video and the pics below for more details, enjoy!

VIDEO

PICS

So, I went through my road trip pictures one last time and came up with a few images I haven’t shown you yet. These are the last ones, though. Now, I will have to make a new road trip before I show you more of this kind of pics.

The title pic is some Motorhome made on a Chevy C-10. Not only it looks kind of cool, the color gives the whole thing a “flower power” look. I thought it was a funny ride! Plus the landscape gives the pic a “rubber tramp” theme, somehow.

In my last post on cool rides, I’ve shown you a red Ford hotrod – well, this green Ford HotRod Pickup was standing right in front of the shop, as I came out after checking out that red hot rod. It turns out that this guy also made himself a hot rod out of an old body that was rusting away somewhere. As he couldn’t find the original grille, he just welded some bars there in the front and gave the whole thing a “mean look”. As the guy told me, this ride is nothing for lovers of the original thing, but it is fun to drive and works great as a daily beater for him.

This 1965 Ford F-100 Pick Up truck is currently being restored. You may see on this pic, that the roof is primer colored. As I was told, this pickup was so rusty, that they had to replace the roof from a donor cabin they found somewhere. The guy made this by his own and I must say that you couldn’t really see where the welding seam was. Great job. I hope to get to see the finished pick up some time.

This is, I think, a 1972 Ford Truck. It was cool to see that hey still use this kind of trucks over there. In other parts of the world, they would have thrown away such an old truck. Not there, though. And as you can see, the truck is in a really good shape for a construction truck. The paint was almost immaculate!

This was actually one of the last cool cars I saw on my road trip. It is a Ford A that was made into a Pickup. You can see the bed behind, and from the way the body line goes, that bed is not original. Anyhow, I thought it was a cool one! Tood bad it is rusting away there, as it isn’t in such a bad shape for a Ford Model A.

I hope you liked the pics!

We get a lot of emails from our readers, some send back greetings or comments – others send us pics of their builds and projects. So my brother and I thought, it would be great to show everybody the cool stuff our readers send us. Of course, we asked for permission first.

The title pic is a diorama John made for his friend. Note that the diorama is a street with the front of a music store. I must say, that’s a great present for a friend! Awesome work!

You can really get the feeling of a busy street! I love that store front. As John tells me, the store is about 5 to 6 inches deep, so it fits on a shelf to be hung on the wall. One detail we can’t see here on the pics: John signed his work of art on the sidewalk with a toothpick while the sidewalk was still wet. Really cool!

Gary sent me some pics of his junkyard diorama. On the one above you can see those three junkers – by the way, I’ve also built that 57 Ford as a junker. I love the rusty wires!

This seems to be Revell’s 1959 Ford Fairlane Skyliner, sleeping under a big cover. This would look great in a barn diorama, I guess. I imagine the car next to an old barn, covered. Or maybe under a wooden carport that looks as if it was going to fall on the car any time soon.

This Ford Woody was sent to me by Robin. Great work I must say. After asking him about it, he told me it was a modified Jimmy Flintstone resin body on a Lindberg kit chassis. Awesome ride!

This “shark bite surf shop” also came from Robin. These rides have a real “surfer” style! I can imagine all that tiny rust spots coming from the salty ocean air – maybe somewhere on the west cost?

I hope you all liked these pics as much as I did. I do have more pics to post from readers, so stay tuned if you want to see what other guys are building!

A few months ago I started searching for old television sets for a project that I want to make. Finally I’ve found this one which I think will fit perfectly for what I have in mind. I’m not gonna tell you what is going to be! Just stay tuned! (Never a truer word spoken!)

The only problem was that this old TV was in Germany and I’m in The Netherlands. The seller agreed to bring it to my sister’s place. Last weekend I went to Germany for visiting her and brought this TV with me.

I love this colorful plastics from the 60′s and 70′s. That was a great time not only for design, but also for good old TV series like Dukes of Hazard, Knight rider, B.J. and the bear, CHiPs, Starsky and Hutch, S.W.A.T., A-Team, etc

Here you have a few pics and details of this old TV set.

Here you have a few intros of good old TV series that I’ve found on youtube. Enjoy!

Starsky and Hutch

Dukes of Hazard

A-Team

Knight Rider

This year I wanted to make something special for Iggy’s birthday, so I decided to make a pair of paintings of one of his favorites cars, the argentine TORINO, built by IKA and Renault in argentina from the 60s to the 80s. The car is based on the american Rambler with a customized body by Pininfarina and a few other special mechanic elements from Germany and Italy. A real argentine car, a mix of european and american origins. If you are curious about this car, you can learn more about it on this wikipedia article.

Last week he came to visit me and I surprised him with this paintings. Happy birthday Iggy!

I’ve told you that I started the Black Widow from Revell. Of course, the idea wasn’t to build the car just out of the box. Thanks to the hints and tips given by some of you, I found some really cool insights. So there is some scratch building involved here. But while talking about the Black Widow with my brother, we also talked about the Fords in stock car racing – and we soon came up with Fireball Robert’s 1956 Ford Fairlane. So my brother started that one – including even more scratch building. You can get a sneak peek on the title picture of this post. We are recording everything on camera and we will put a DVD together some time this year featuring both cars.

You may remember that one of the things I disliked about the black widow kit was the engine bay, more specifically, the wheel covers. So, after cutting the part shown on the pic above…

… I just added an styrene stripe to finish the wheel covers. A very small detail and very easy to make but with a high impact.

Another interesting detail, and thanks to the hints you guys gave me, is the front axle. Here you can see the stabilizer bar and the plates on the lower control arms. I also added the reinforcement of the rear axle, which is just a simple transverse rod I made out of an styrene stripe.

Stay tuned for more info!

Last week I just finished this series of Chevy Bel Air paintings. The tri-chevys are among my favorite cars since I was a kid. Unluckily I’m not the only one…  and in the meanwhile the prices of this great Chevys are beyond most people’s reach.

As you might notice by now I do not limit my creativity to model cars only. I love to do lots of things also painting.

I started painting about 20 years ago. Over the years I used many different painting techniques but this time I wanted to do something different and thought about combining my paintings with other materials such newspaper paper with printings of vintage owner manuals, assembly manuals, prospects, advertising, etc.

I also thought about including a little detail for this series and decided to create a small relief on the canvas as you’ll notice on the detail pictures below.

Do you like them? What do you think?

Take care,

Seb

PS: Although this paintings are decorating my workplace now, they are FOR SALE. If you are interested in the paintings, please drop me a line to: info (at) modeljunkyard (dot) com . I also do paintings on commission.

TRI-CHEVY SERIES

acrylic paint, newspaper paper, relief on canvas

30 x 30 cm – 3,5 cm deep / 11.8×11.8 inch – 1.37 inch deep

’55 Chevy Bel Air

’56 Chevy Bel Air

’57 Chevy Bel Air

RELIEF

If your favorite scale is 1/25 and you were looking for a tractor, you might have already noticed that there are not so many options available. Most of the farm and land machinery scale models are available rather in smaller (1/32) or bigger (1/16) scales.

Not so long ago I was looking for scale models to buy online and accidentally found this 1/25 scale Hanomag K55 crwaler tractor from Wiking, Germany. I immediately realized that the model was not that detailed as I would like it to have and that it’s not even a kit but a glued plastic model. I took the risk and bought two of them. One for myself, the other one for my brother Iggy (shh! don’t tell him! he still doesn’t know it! ).

I carefully started disassembling the scale model. To my surprise the glue was not that strong and pieces would come apart very easily, almost intact. After disassembling all the model I decided to start with the part I thought needed the most attention and at the same time the most challenging: the crawler tracks!

After drilling 396 holes (plus a few more for the front wheels), 132 cuts, lots of sanding and shaping the crawler tracks now look a little more realistic and I’m happy with the result. Here you have a video and a few pics and tips from the process:

VIDEO

PICS

The holes

After googling for real pictures of the Hanomag K55 I learned how the crawler chain shoes are supposed to look like. Each of them have 4 holes on the top, 2 on the side and in order to separate them from each other I had to make 2 cuts at each shoe.

I first tried out one crawler shoe. I was satisfied with the result so I repeated the process on all of them.

You’ll need a filing tool, sanding paper, a cutting disk (approx. 1 mm), and a few drill bits.

- 1 mm and 2 mm for the holes on the top

- 1,5 mm for the holes on the side.

Shaping

Old crawler chains are not so straight anymore and hang a little at the top. Using a hair dryer I heated up the plastic and shaped it in order to get that look. I love the result!

The chain’s edges are just too sharp for such an old tractor or even a new one. The shoes are made out of cast iron and they are never as sharp as originally casted on the model. This also needed to be fixed.

The front wheel

The front wheel was massive. I decided to open those holes as well. First I drilled a few holes and I slowly cut the space between the spokes open with the knife.

That’s much better! isn’t it?

The finished crawler tracks

That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh!

It looks more difficult to do than it really is. Within a few hours you should be done.

What do you think? Any questions or comments?

I wrote a kit review about this Revell model some time ago. I really liked the kit right from the start. So, when my brother and discussed about our next project, an instruction DVD tutorial, I suggested to build this car in the racer stock car version. By the way, we will be filming this work from April 24th on, Stay tuned for updates here at the blog!

Building Tips

I wanted to use some time and prepare the kit before we start the main filming session.

I keep my opinion on the kit – it is really a great kit. But as you may know, when you start to build the kit, you see some details better. The body has some really nice moulded details – no question about that. Still, this kit, as almost any, needs some clean up. On the title pic you can see a mould seam crossing the trunk lid.

Pay attention to the front too! The mould seams around the headlights are hard to oversee. Since I was at it, I had a closer look around the body and found more mould seams on the roof, starting at the a-pillar and on the rear quarter, starting at the base of the c-pillar. Never paint a body without doing this work. You may also want to look closer at the parts – the rear axle has a pretty thick moulding seam, as well as the exhaust pipes (as usual).

I’ve cleaned the chromed engine parts. As I want to build a realistic looking stock car from the 50s, chromed engine parts aren’t really useful. Painting on the chrome is tricky, as the paint slips on the chrome. Besides, the chrome plus the paint on top can hide many details.

A few facts and many questions

To get ready for this project, I’m taking some time for research. I already told you that this car was actually a utility sedan – used by salesmen and handymen. Now, for the racers, I’m missing many facts.

I know that the Black Widow stock cars had only one seat’s back rest – the driver’s – to save some weight. Besides, the backrest was slightly modified – as far I could find out. It had a sort of side rest, probably to avoid the driver to slip over to the passenger’s side on a turn.

Furthermore, if you look at the pictures from the old days, you will see that these stock cars had a sort of rope to hold the trunk lid and the hood. I’ve seen many pics of the engine – all pretty much the same as the normal fuel injected 57 chevrolet engine.

Appart from that, I don’t really know if the inside door panels where the same as in the 150 Sedan. I also wonder if the chassis was somehow special.

So if you have any pics or facts on this car, please let me know.