More Matador Madness

All this work with the Matador rebuild has made me pick a unmade kit from the box and start again. Its probably been five or so years since the last time I built the Airfix kit, and I remember that it was a build of two halves. Some stages good, but then again I seem to recall that the deck and tarp may have been a little tricky.

Stage one, the cab. Relativity simple work, but this example had quite a bit of flash to remove (But since the mold is 49 years old this year I can forgive that). The driver with the M1 US helmet is a mystery, why put him in there? You could always pretend he is a Soviet driver I suppose as the mother country supplied the USSR with a few thousand of them. I used a Airfix driver from the Universal Carrier set instead.

Stage two the deck and tarp. Not as bad as I remember. A good idea is to use superglue here and work piece by piece instead of just wacking two sides on at once. The tarp is shockingly undetailed, and is hard to get just right. I plane to add the rear end of a GMC tarp like with the other Matador to upgrade it.

Stage three are the boxes under the deck and the mud guards. The boxes look a little small, but everything fits well.

Stage four the chassis. The leaf springs are a total pain in the butt. It may have been that I was tired but I kept on dropping them or misaligning them. I eventually used tweezers like I should have done from the start. As I am changing the wheels i left off some of the parts underneath until I get the axles sorted.

Mating of the stages. Again to ensure hassle free fit I used superglue and held it for a minute or so. Much better alignment than the one I made years ago.

Axles with donor wheels from the Airfix Scammell truck. The bigger tyres are needed. If you look at the Matador in the rear of the shot you will see they look too small. swap them if you can.

Model on