Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the modeling bench

Yes, Guards vans again...

Tonight we get to move to the body of the 47' van. These vans were the first to have internal doors instead of the previous externally hung doors, which are far easier to model. After tossing round several plans while in the shower (its where I do some of my best thinking) involving various arrangements and throwing out the hardest to implement, I settled on building the sides in 2 layers. I used the grooved plasticard cut to the correct height (in this case 17mm) from the scaled plan. The inner layer is all one piece cut to a length 2mm shorter than the van length, with the windows cut out and the door edges marked. I marked these to the nearest grove rather than the precise measurement as its far easier to cut and looks much neater. The edges were cleaned up with a file.

The windows are then marked and cut. This is a hard task and can end in disaster. The trick is to start the knife blade in the corners and cut away. Do this for all the corners stating on that particular orientation. DON'T try to cut in one go, 5-6 cuts is far better. Rotate the side and then cut away from the next set of corners in the same fashion. when you have gone all the way around, if the centers will not poke out easily, turn the side over and make a couple of thin cuts on the white stress lines that should be visible. the centers should then poke out. I then use a knife blade to clean the window edges up and make them square.


Cut the outside layer to the lengths indicated on the plan so that the door openings are the correct size, clean up the edges with a file and then glue into place. I do this with the sides vertical on the workbench so that the bottom edges line up. You should now have 2 sides with a rebated edge at each end.

The door openings have small edge pieces top and bottom, and I used strips of plasticard cut from the grooved sheet. The last challenging bit is the horizontal board along the top. This is cut from thin plasticard (maybe 0.1 or 0.2mm thick).
cut this 2mm wide ( or whatever the plan says) and glue into position. After the glue is dry then remove the plastic that's covering the door spaces.


The ends were done in a similar way to the 30' van. I started at the platform end. An inner was cut to the correct size for the width of the inner side, and glued in flush with the end of the inner piece. The pieces each side of the door opening were cut to size and glued on, and the sided filed back so that the end was flush at the corner. I cut out the door panel in the same manner as the 30' van and glued it into place. The opposite end was a bit harder as the door is recessed. I cut out an inner of the correct width again, and glued it into place 7mm from the end of the van. The end pieces were cut to size and glued into the ends. I then cut another 2 pieces as the sides of the short corridor and glued them in. Another door was cut and glued at the end. As a last step the horizontal strip was added at the top and cut back to size when dry. I finally glued in a couple of braces to stop the sides from bowing.


These long wordy posts have made it very clear to me that I have not taken enough pictures, and I'm crap at drawing diagrams.

To finish up as I'm impatient, I glued the body onto the underframe. The headstocks are 2mm by 1mm Channel that I now use for this purpose.