End of the Road

Started November 2019, stopped Sepember 2020. Not completed as planned.

I hate not finishing what I start, but 10 months after I had started this build, I lost my mojo and stopped. I suppose that one can consider it to be complete, but I know that it is not. I still want to display it in a shadowbox diorama one day. Maybe.

 

This time, I did not start with the base, rather with making the bike, then the dog, followed by the trailer and then on to making the sidecar to fit the dog. Only after that, did I turn my attention to the base.

 

BIKE 

Having watched all the Mad Max movies, this was my reference. I used Tamiya’s 1/12th Virago kit and bashed the heck out of it!

 

For the wheels, I bought two 1/12th scale  Maisto die cast dirt bikes so that I could use the rear tyres and then used a pill bottle to make the wheel to fit.

I covered the tank with surgical gauze after having initially used mesh, but that looked too clean and neat for a Mad Max type bike.

Doing so however meant that I had to widen the triple clamps and swingarm. To comlete the fork assembly, I added a 3D printed skull.

 

I have assembled and painted enough Tamiya Virago engines to make doing this one a breeze.

 

I chopped the seat and made a box for the back using 0.5mm styrene.

For the custom exhausts, I used 1.5mm copper wire to form the shape, wrapped it in masking tape to smooth it a bit, then filled the gaps using Polyfilla Fine Crack Filler. Once dry, I wrapped the pipes with masking tape that I had cut to 3mm wide. 

DOG

Every rover needs a dog. This one’s name is DOG.Both man and dog were 3D printed.

 

I chopped the man a bit and used a combination of copper wires and Pratley’s quickset epoxy putty to shape his arms in the position that I wanted them. His shotgun was also 3D printed.

 

I painted DOG the same colouring as a dog had – Dexter. Dexter died by drowning whilst having a seizure and falling in the pool.  That was super sad, but the vet says he would not have felt a thing because the seizure would have numbed his brain at the time. So sad……

but now Dexter lives on in this diorama......

SIDECAR

The sidecar was a bit more complex to make than the trailer and once again, it was, by and large, scratch built - except for the wheels.

 

I carefully made the sidecar to fit the dog and modified the bike to accept a sidecar based on what I’d seen other guys doing (in 1:1 scale) on the internet. The rest was simply imagining that I was a scavenging rover and, from there, thinking how I’d make it.

TRAILER

In the future, water will be a rare commodity, so the guy needed a trailer.

 

I modified the back of the bike so as to be able to pull a light trailer.

All but the wheels and some accessories were scratch built.

THE BASE

As mentioned above, the design for the base changed from what I had initially planned to what it eventually became.

I made a foundation using wood and filled this with Cemcrete.

Once dry (2 weeks later – just to be sure), I capped the top with a piece of cardboard, followed by a piece of sanding paper that I had made to look like a really neglected section of tar road.

I then sculpted the sides using Cemcrete and airbrushed various shades of browns onto the sides to simulate soil and used varnish that I had stained yellow to look like murky water.

The crows and bones were 3D printed.

FINALLY

Then it was a simple matter of putting it all together. As I mentioned above, I think I had lost my mojo because of how long the build took. Nonetheless this was an enjoyable endeavour, along with new challenges and opportunities.

I might very well still put this in a shadow box, giving it a post-apocalyptic-type of mood.

ASSEMBLY TO THIS POINT