Westlake Publishing Forums

Quote from: finescalerr on May 07, 2026, 06:11:51 PMIt's a shame bikes aren't designed for beautiful girls in thong bikinis, each eager to cater to your every whim. -- Russ

It sounds to me, Russ, that you just watched the video to "You shook me all night long"

That store owner looks like Winston Churchill!

The floating feet read as not fully grown. Either way works.

There is part of me that would love for this kid to be sitting outside Wilson's Garage reading The Great Gatsby.

Why not just slide a couple of 1:12 scale magazines under his toes?

Oh, yeah, that's really not the point of good modeling, is it?

Russ

This is how the figure looked prior to "foot surgery".





Stuart

Stuart, the boy is an excellent addition to the gas station. Your solution to keeping his feet on the ground is a good one, though since he's reading Adventure magazine, it's likely his feet would be floating off the ground.
I'm curious to see how you tackle the orange soda bottle and the magazine cover.

An excellent figure. It's good to see well-defined eyes, clear separation between items of clothing and shoes that don't merge into his ankles. Some commercial 3D-print figures (cough Model cough U) tend to fall a bit short on these sort of details, which makes painting them somewhat more difficult than with the better hand-sculpted figures.

Here's yet another figure Frithjof and I have been working on for my gas station, a young fellow enjoying a sip of orange soda while reading his comic book. 

This figure has been more of a challenge on several fronts.  The first issue was trying to get the distance from his posterior to the bottom of his feet to match the height of the bench. Part of the problem was that his coat tails extended beyond his posterior instead of resting evenly at bench level.  I went ahead and printed the figure hoping I could sand down the coat tails sufficiently so that he could sit properly on the bench.  That method worked but still his feet floated in the air just above ground level. 

That correction took a little more engineering.  I printed a second figure then cut the feet off just above his pant cuff.  I then sanded away the pant cuff to match the rest of his ankle thus creating an extended length of his leg.  With careful sanding and much testing, I eventually managed to create two new feet with extended ankles to attach to the original footless figure.  I didn't feel this was too objectionable as most boys his age experience growth spirts that leave their trousers shorter than what parents can keep up with.





And then as I have been prone to do lately, I presented the photograph to ChatGPT to do its magic.  Here's hoping what the final outcome will be.





Stuart

A little more to show.

After the hub and all the spokes are glued to the .020 disc they are trued up in the "poor man's mill" to fit into the recess cut into the wheel rings. The .020 backer is then cut out from between the spokes leaving a solidly constructed wheel center.



This picture is just showing an assortment of pieces that went into the wheel construction.



A set of completed wheel "rims" set in the track assembly and held in place with the wood block. The track is an extra set I ordered, with this project in mind, when I built the Cat 60's, they are not really correct for the Athey Truss Wheels but more on that later.


Thanks for taking a look.
Rick

Thanks Russ.

Or you can try it the old fashioned way.
I'll admit I had to go back to one of my apprenticeship books to totally remember, this build was 13 years ago.

So I just shot a couple of photos, it is pretty self explanatory.