Owners' Club Mazda T2000 '56
Project start 2017
https://petrolicious.com/articles/the-mazda-t2000-is-not-your-typical-workhorseTo dispel any funny ideas right from the start: Mazda did not build an advanced terminator..
To me, the three wheeled utility vehicles popular in East Asia are delishiously quirky, and thus a target for building. In real life, they certainly were no joke. I could try to go into the details of these machines, but I guess it's better for everyone if I leave that to the real enthousiast in this article.
The kit, like all in this series, is simple but adequate for the target audience. These are not for hard code scale modellers, but rather for the owners of the real things willing to dabble in building models for a nice little thing on the mantle piece. So, limited detail, but what's there does the job.
2022-10-14
I'm beginning to think this kit may just be jinxed.
During the initial burst of activity in 2017, I ran into a problem with the windscreen. I'd given it
a good dunking in Clear/Future, and for some reason, that decided to completely run off half of the plastic,
leaving an ugly line right over the screen. Not just once, but several attemps followed by cleaning the
whole mess off gave the same resuls. I ended up parking the thing to avoid tossing it out the window.
This time round, things started out better. I managed to get the windscreen into something acceptable using Tamiya varnish, and got quite a bit of construction done on the chassis. I airbrushed it with Arcus enamel 'steel', which is actually nearly black. A good colour for it, but I find I don't like the Arcus paints all that much and it's not that commonly available, so if I ever run out of this one pot, I might be in trouble with any spot painting.
I tried to get clever with the wood loading floor, hoping to bring out the engraved woodgrain by slapping on and wiping either burn sienna or raw umber oils, but that didn't work. While the result is quite acceptable, too much of the oils was wiped for the affect I really wanted. Oh well, not every experiment results in a useful trick.
And then I hit a snag. The headlights simply do not fit inside the wells they're supposed to go into.
It took some time to find workable replacements, and by the time those arrived, the T2000 had once again
been knocked off the bench by other projects and parked.
To be continued, sometime..