Scratchbuilt 1/8th scale Spyder/Exercising Sulky
Here is a 1/8th scale “Exercising Cart", or, you can use its popular name that it goes by today, a 'Spider', for very obvious reasons.
The full sized vehicle was owned by Mrs Val Perkins, from a small town called Coonewarre, which is in Victoria, Australia.
It had been ‘rejuvenated' by a Mr Neil Wilson, from Sydney, back in 2005 before Val bought it.
No drawings were available for this type of vehicle, so I had to take heaps of measurements and lots of photos of the 'original vehicle', to use as reference material for the required drawings.
Back home and started to do the drawings for it on the computer, when they looked correct, I started to build it, this took about 4 months from start to the finish of making it.
Every square nut and ALL the Coachbolts are hand made, I use square rod for making the square nuts and Tobin Bronze rods for making the coach bolts, the only screws that were 'store bought' for this model, are the ‘massive' 1.2mm X 6mm long countersunk screws, that hold the brass channel to the two piece laminated wooden fellies, everything else is hand made.
The paint is just normal everyday enamel house paint and the decals are home made on an ALPS MD 5500 printer, using CorelDraw on an old ‘windows' computer loaded with XP.
The tyres are store bought ' hydraulic O rings', the rubber tyres should be of a squarish section, I could not get the appropriate sizes of the squarish section rings, so had to settle for round "O" rings instead.
The axle is a chunk of keysteel of the appropriate size and given a bit of reworking to get it to look correct, turned down each end and threaded each end as well, to hold each wheel to the axle with a hand made nut.
The first two photos are of the original vehicle, then the drawing I had to make before I could even start on it.
A series of photo's then show the progression of the model and then the finished item.
I made two of these Scale Model Horse Drawn Vehicles at the same time, one I painted and the other I left unfinished, this way everybody could actually see what went into making these models, as they sit end for end in a Glass Cabinet.
Have a look at the following photos and if anybody has any questions, then please ask ——————
Another superlative scratch build job, Graham! Great idea to have partly done side by side with the completed one!
It's just to show how much work went into making the model, it gives a bit more of an understanding of what actually goes on.
Very impressive scratch building, Graham @radishus4
The Spider naming makes definitely sense.
Those close-up images clearly do indeed reveal how much work went into this subject.
Thanks John, I tried something new when making this model. Instead of trying to steam bend the timber for the curved bits of timber, I decided to laminate the timbers instead. Worked a treat and sure will be using that method again when ever I have to.
Graham, @radishus4, that is a beautiful scratch built project. All of your projects have been really interesting and fantastically built. It is also shows that modeling is more than just planes, cars and tanks. Your unusual, not in the mainstream, builds are a fascinating to look at and a testimant to your skill.
It is a bit different to today's method's of construction, basically going back to the way models were made decades ago, all by hand. There are are others that do this form of modelling as well and every model that is made this way is different, not just another one of ten million that is made by a machine, so it is very satisfying to make these.