Zil 4906 [13] Wheels.

Well, whaddaya know? All the wheels are on. I have been busy, I guess. Still to do work on the windows and hatches and some other cabin-related greebles. Now there are some things to say about the wheels and the way they are attached to the vehicle. More on that below.

Maxim has designed this vehicle in a very very thoroughly detailed way. For every wheel there of course is a separate suspension. Each suspension set has more than 20 parts. Times six makes over 120 parts. That's a lot. And a lot of work. It looks great, doing them at the same time, it really takes away the boredom a bit. It still is hard, though.
Especially the alignment of the suspension arms to get the angle right for the swivelling triangles that connect the suspension with the wheels themselves. You need to have it at a 90º angle with the ground to get the camber right. That is a lot of adjusting, re-adjusting and more readjusting. Also a lot of cutting and bending.

A part of the 120+ parts of all the wheel suspension sets.

The left and right set are front and back wheel. They can steer and need the swivelling triangular parts next to the little paper rolls. The long bar below is the bottom part of the suspension where the main arms are glued to.

So finally they are all glued and look the part. The swivelling sets all are reinforced with an extra square of grey paper to enlarge the glue surface for the wheels. I made two small cardboard stands to put the bottom spine of the still wheel-less vehicle on to get all wheels aligned and straight and to let the wheels dry in position without them taking the full load of the truck. And well, it looked pretty good. Even better than I expected.

Looking underneath there was hardly anything left to see of all the 120+ pieces of the suspensions. A bit of a bummer, really. I rather leave stuff off when it isn't visible at all. I didn't know until it was 'too late'....

Now that was not all... All the wheels were very wobbly in the end. Not just the steering wheels but all of them. The tiny suspension arms that carry the load of the truck couldn't quite cope with the weight. The tires all were having trouble staying straight up and the top was touching the walls of the wheel wells.
Anyway, I decided to make the connection between wheel and chassis a bit stronger and used a generous amount of PVA glue to do so. Left the Zil to dry and now it stands on its own and doesn't look sagged.

This is actually all there is to see of the suspension. When using a camera set on macro. With the naked eye it is very hard to discern details here. So glue doesn't do any harm here.

I don't know, it might be me doing something wrong, I also didn't figure out how to get the wheels actually rotating until it was too late and I was getting a bit fed up with it so this is another lost detail. Luckily I plan to display it as a static model so there's no need for a lot of moving stuff. I am not really disappointed, like I said, I might have done something wrong myself. The original instructions are a little unclear here and there.

So anyway, here we are then. Up next is the detailing of the cabin. Hatches, hinges, mirrors and an antenna. And then we're finally back in space territory with the Soyuz capsule.

Until next time and thanks for stopping by.
--PK