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Another Model T was finished early this year (2012), a 1919 Ford
Model T CSAA Road Sign Patrol Car I found some pictures of this car years ago, but there were not enough details to go on so I abandoned the project. But last year I found a whole lot of them with lots of details. Right, now we’re getting somewhere! The original car is shown on the first picture below. It did take some time to figure out all the details of the unusual structure, but gradually the ‘how to do’ design grew in my head and I started the model early March. The body, fender assembly, wheels an tires are from a ’25 T Roadster. The windscreen was scratch build. I think it took about 48 parts to get a correct ’19 model windscreen. The ‘superstructure’ which is holding the white poles for the road signs was mainly constructed from 0.3 strips of brass. Biggest problem was to get the alignment of the rear part of that structure, fitted on the pickup bed, and front part, fitted on the front part of the chassis, correct. The pickup bed was scratch build from styrene. Allthough it’s completely insane, I managed to get that pickup bed lid to close with tiny clamps. They are so small that I can open them using my finger nails, but when I have to close them I have to use a magnifier. Yep, I agree, mad detail idea, but it does work… The front wheels were made steerable. This time I used the thinnest possible materials, like 0.3mm brass wire to connect the moving parts. For the top I made the correct top irons and top saddles. The top boot was made from plastic, but I didn’t like the look of it after it was painted flat black. It looked a bit too… well, flat. But I discovered an old black umbrella. The fine structure of the fabric of that umbrella looked perfect so I decided to give it a try. And it worked out very well, it looks like the original. Next thing was to add some details which were not visible on the real car, but I figured that they would look realistic. I was lucky to find some pictures of period correct CSAA road signs on the internet. The original enamel signs were not in a very good condition (some had bullet holes) so the first thing I had to do was to ‘restore’ them to get some nice new signs. Those old enamel signs could easily chip and just putting them in the pickup bed would surely damage them. I had no idea how the CSAA solved that problem, so I designed and build my own sign holder. It fits perfect in the pickup bed. The signs were printed on paper and the back was covered with 0.25 mm black plastic. And without further ado here are the pictures of the finished Model T. |
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