It's the middle of June---so let's do a SNOWPLOW!
Actually finished this one a few months back, as a tribute to those overworked and under-appreciated civil servants in my (near-) hometown of Chicago IL. Kit is the actual 'snowplow' issue of the old AMT Ford LNT-8000, with an old-style ('60s-'70s, I think) plow assembly and rear-gate salt-spreader added into the kit as seperate bagged parts. First release of the kit, I believe, dates back to the early '70s, in a bunch of different versions, though I don't know if the snowplow mod was one of the original variants or a later addition.
I love doing Chicago-area vehicles. I got the 'bug' to do this one when I chanced across a beautiful super high-res photo that somebody had posted online, of just the door of the vehicle---with a straight-on, perfectly-lit, suitable-for-making-my-own-decals rendition of the colorful Chicago municipal seal. Lots of other photos online, of all sorts of iterations of the city's plow fleet---so I just sort of did a 'representational' vehicle, without too much worry about specifics.
Built the kit pretty much as-is, adding a few lines to the engine compartment, some details to the cab interior, and assorted cables and hydraulic lines (for the plow assembly) and chains for tires and the gate latches. Kit was a typical artifact of its era, with wildly-varying fit, lots of mold alignment issues and sink-holes the size of good old Chicago pot-holes---but, hey, that's what putty is for. Most frustrating (for a non-regular truck builder like myself) was the kit instructions: though the kit's seemingly-hundreds of faintly-similar-looking pieces were all carefully numbered, the instructions ignored them, giving only numbers for the order of 'build sequence' for each step; no 'map' of the sprues to go by, with vague and occasionally downright misleading drawings to straighten it all out.
Paints were eyeball-mixed Tamiya acrylics. Top color was a pretty easy call, but the bottom color looks widely-different in assorted photos, from orange to brown to tan, so I just chose a happy medium and drybrushed it into submission.
"Salt load" is kitchen-style sea-salt white-glued to a painted and textured corrugated cardpoard 'plate' cut to fit the bed. Decals all home-tweaked from online images or made up, printed on my faithful HP with BareMetal (Inkjet) Decal paper, and sealed with Testors Decal Bonder.
Enjoy!
