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A couple of months I decided to push the boat out and treat myself to a Globe Liner. It was originally with the intention of building a 6wd off road lorry with walking beams fitted to a single rear axle. When the kit arrived from Fusion Hobbies, I thought I would put it together as a stock kit initially, then modify it at a later stage. However, once I started building it I decided that I liked it as the stock kit, so ended up 'completing' the build within a couple of weeks, to the standard of a completed rolling chassis. So this thread is not a blow by blow description of a standard build, as there are probably loads of those floating in the internet already, this is just some details on what I did differently.  Along the way I made only a few mods, I fitted a set of roller bearings, made some custom exhausts and a new billet aluminium bumper, and a new pivot shaft for the rear leaf springs.

Custom pivot shaft vs stock:

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As well as the stock shaft having one of the leaf spring pivot sitting on a portion of the thread, it was also a bit on the thin side:

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Whereas the one I made was properly the 3mm that the brass bushes are bored to:

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Fitted

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Aluminium Bumper

The aluminium bumper was machined out on my milling machine and then polished with 2000 & 4000 grit wet and dry in a bowl of warm soapy water. The reason I made my own bumper was that I didn't want a plastic bumper that once scratched would show black plastic through the chrome, and also, quite a few years ago, I had a King hauler, and when I ran that I found the licence plates scraped the floor when going over a any slightly damaged surface, causing the light lenses to fly out, so I wanted a bumper with a bit more ground clearance. Sure it would have been easier to just chop the licence plates off the stock bumper, but that would have shown up bare plastic under the chrome.

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Custom Exhausts

When I built the War Rig I had a degree of success making exhaust tails from polished steel tube using a Draper miniature pipe bender, so thought I would have another go at it for this model. It ended up being a right pain and took me about 6 attempts to get a decent results. The first problem was that I couldn't remember what metal I'd used to make the originals with. I did have a small piece left over from the War Rig pipes, but ballsed it up on the first attempt so no metal to use. As such, I bored out some 10mm steel bar on the lathe so that it had 0.5mm wall thickness and tried that. It collapsed when I tried to bend it. So I then tried 1mm wall thickness and the benders nearly broke trying to bend it even slightly (There is a big warning on them saying only use for copper pipe ). Then I remembered that I'd used some B&Q 10mm pipe for the War Rig pipes. This isn't that same quality as the engineering steel I'd been gifted before (The B&Q stuff is I think formed from sheet and then welded, rather than the seamless round bar.). Finally success, I managed to bend the pipes without the bender exploding, and I was able to finish the pipes off by shaping the ends with the milling machine.

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I also added a couple of peelers vintage decals to the mudflaps:

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A proper universal joint between the drive axles, which I got from Prices Model Trucks on ebay:

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and a Tamiya driver figure:

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After I'd put all this together, of course I wanted a trailer for it as well. Now IMO, 1/14 trailers are eye wateringly expensive for what they are, so I initially thought I build my own. A quick investigation on Ebay revealed that even buying cheap Chinese 1/14 tires, the rear suspension and shocks and a light bar was going to set me back almost as much as a Tamiya flatbed trailer. So I bought a Tamiya flatbed trailer instead, initially thinking I'd strip it for parts and make a slightly longer log trailer from B&Q box section and 2 left over frame rails I had from when I made the war rig trailer incorrectly and used frame rails that were too shallow. Another order to Fusion Hobbies and the trailer promptly arrived in the post. Looking through the box I mostly liked what I saw so decided to build it almost as stock and then do another trailer at a later date. After emptying the contents of the box, I was a bit disappointed with the quality of the plastic used to mould the rear light cluster and the bolster pins that run down the side of the trailer. It's coloured in a horrible gunmetal metallic-ish finish, so I decided to spray the lot matt black. Whilst I was at it, I didn't think that the bare metal finish of the aluminium parts looked particularly realistic either, so ended painting the underside parts in matt black as well (whilst having flashbacks to the War Rig build lol ). The plate at the front of the trailer I painted the same red as tractor unit, as well as the aluminium L section that runs down the sides.

I also decided at this point that I wanted to add lights to the trailer, including side running lights, so after much work and rework (I'd initially wired all the LEDs up in parallel which I later found out from friends with more knowledge than me that that would probably cause the resistors to melt), I got to this stage.

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This got me point of having the rear lights, 12 orange side lights, 2 indicators, and brake lights wired in.

As I was going to make the lights work, I didn't really want the 3 central lights to be decals, so, I drilled the rear panel and made a small plastic mount to clamp in the 3 LEDs:

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After that I was able to finally fit the wood to the trailer bed (The trailer had been worked on for about 3-4 weeks by now, and it should have taken about a day to assemble without painting or adding lights. I was a bit of a doughnut however, because when I first built the trailer I didn't follow (i.e. read carefully) the instructions, nor did I build it in order, so had the whole thing more or less assembled apart from the wood bed and the leg activation mechanism, when I discovered I'd put the main bottom plate in upside down (Hence the reason the lower plate is painted matt black on the inside with 2 aluminium speed stripes !)  and had to dismantle and re-assemble the trailer.

In order to get the lights to work, I didn't want to spend mega bucks on an MFU or the stock Tamiya lights kits, so bought a 3Racing unit instead for £15 and about 90 LEDs off Ebay for less than a tenner. I used 26gauge silicon wire for the wiring, which is nice and flexible.

To connect up all these LEDs, I ended up putting the LEDs in banks of 3 in series, then connecting the banks up in series. For the indicators, I connected the main 5mm LEDS in the trailer in series, and 5mm Leds in the rear lights clusters in the tractor unit is series, then connected the trailer and tractor unit LEDs in parallel. This was then all connected in series with the small 3mm orange LEDs used to operate the tractor unit front indicators. To connect the trailer lighting to the tractor unit, I bought some Dupont connectors from Ebay (2x5 configuration), and then used the same connectors on the cab lighting, to make it easy to disconnect the cab from the tractor unit. Finally a loom was fitted into the tractor unit to connect the Dupont sockets to the 3racing light unit. Oh, and I also made up shorter Y leads to connect the light unit to the receiver, ESC, and steering servo.

Cab Wiring

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Some of the chassis wiring

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Dupont connector used to connect trailer.

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The finished effect:

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It looks really good! I've always had a soft spot for those old-school semi trucks.

The only thing I would have done differently are the front lights. They're a blue-ish white now, but those old trucks have halogen bulbs so I would have probably liked a bit warmer white for them.

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That is a very nice truck. A semi is on my list of builds!

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