This is the old
Italeri/Zvezda ZiS 151 I bought from ebay. The kit had been in a flood; the plastic was fine, but the box was gone and the instructions and decals had seen better days.
I decided to do a civilian flatbed version and experiment with intermediate rusting. I also had the Eduard PE set for this kit (which is excessive and not that useful).
There is no such thing as too much rust on an old Russian truck:
I used this Zis 131(?) as an inspiration:
The kit is OK for its age. My copy had a badly molded radiator section, with the vanes partly closed off with plastic. The dashboard is nondescript and the Eduart IP is basic, with just some dials and buttons and a clear film for dials. I painted the back of the clear film white and glued it in place. I used some airplane instrument decals to spruce up the main instrument dashboard:
I used the Eduard PE parts for the rest of the
cockpit cab. The seats were sanded to show wear, then I painted some Tamiya glue on the plastic and pressed a PE mesh into it, to give it a slight texture. I added some piping with thin styrene rod:
the truck bed was warped, so I didn't use the sides; I may eventually build something up instead. The weathering isn't as extreme as some of the real world examples. This is definitely a case of too much is not enough:
I used the Eduard radiator replacement vanes to make copies out of plastic strip. I wasn't pleased with the result, so I covered them with a PE mesh bent to fit. I skipped the headlight guards; the kit parts were way out of scale and the PE replacements were too fiddly to build with superglue. I would have to solder them together and just didn't feel like it:
The figure is a 1/35 scale 3D scan of a real person from ReedOak. He's works out to about 5'8/1.73m tall or maybe slightly shorter:
I'm calling this one done for now - I may come up with something for it at a later date.
Thanks for looking!