In this video I will show you how
I made this flat tire from this! Hi there you scale model kit lovers
and welcome in my super tiny shed! And a happy 2022 to you! And I hope you will enjoy
watching this Hobby Robby channel this year too. This vlog is all about how to make a flat
tire on your car model, in my case on my Tamiya Morris Mini Cooper. This is a technique
I learned from a Japanese modeller called Satoshi Araki and I thought you might want to
know how it's done. So, are you pumped already? The tires in Morris Mini Cooper kit by Tamiya
are made of genuine rubber. Some brands have vinyl tires, but these look and feel very nice.
There is a seam line down the middle of the thread which has be removed, so that is step number 1.
Having the rim in the tire makes it easier to sand down the mould line. I don't like
to do this with a machine, but prefer doing it by hand to have maximum control. A bench
full of rubber marbles later, I'm done.
Now let's make the tire flat. Some modellers on YouTube
use a paint stripper for this. Or a lighter. I don't like both of these options as
they can destroy your tire very easily. The method I learned from Araki is to cut up
the tire. Very gentle of course. You make cuts just behind the walls of the tire, they shoudl
stay intact. I considered using chisels to romve the piece of rubber but decided to go with
the hobby knife. When it's removed, you have a U-shaped tire when looking at it head on, but the
front and back are still round. Now I want to make the tire to appear as it is flat and I use a piece
of styrene sheet for that.
A jelly type super glue will make the bond. First I try a dry fit. The
walls of the tire are now thin and wobbely and you don't want them to slip out to the outside.
Instead you want the wall to stay beneath the tire and thus force it to have a better shape like
a real flat tire has. This takes some practise and you will see me do it right on one side and wrong
on the other in a minute. I hold the tire on the plastic sheet for a few minutes to give the jelly
super glue time to dry. Afterwards I use a kicker to make the bond really hard. Here you can clearly
see that the inside of the tire has slipped out. It is not a big problem, but I think it looks
nicer when the wall stays underneath the tire. I cut off the excess plastic card with scissors
as close to the edge of the tire I can get. The fine work is done by knife.
We don't want
to see a strip of plastic under our tire do we? So I sand it down as thin as possible. I think the
tire has a nice stance. I fill up the gaps between the plastic card and the tire with leftover rubber
pieces. Mr Hobby tire Black is my to go to colour, for obvious reasons, to paint the edges of the
plastic card to make it practically invisible. Time for the rims to get a treatment. As a
base I always use Tamiya Surface Primer Gray, mixed 50-50 with Lacquer Thinner
Retarder type of the same brand. You can have quite a discussion about how to
replicate oxidized aluminium in a right colour. I chose not to use any metallic colours
but to go for a flat grey.
Vallejo Model Air Colours need a bit of thinning in my humble
opinion and cerntainly must have a few drops of flow improver to prevent tip dry. Because this
paint can give you some headaches if you don't! Oxidized aluminium looks not only dull and and
grey, but also has those typical white spots. A method of applying those specks is using the
splatter or speckling technique. I lended the needle from my airbrush and smeared it with some
white paint. By gently rubbing over the needle with your brush, small speckles will fly off it
and hopefully land on the rim. Be careful not to add too much paint on your needle, because
the speckles will be huge then. I wasn't too happy with the Off White color of Vallejo as
it doesn't have great covering capabilities, so I tried Citadel Corax White which is know to
have a lot of pigment, as you can clearly see. But speckling this paint is quite hard, because
of this high pigment count.
It dries pretty fast as there is not much thinner in it and it's
heavy so it won't fly easily so to speak. Eventually I went on to use a acrylic
primer which doe the job prefectly. A grey enamel wash is ideal to give
the recesses more depth and shadows. Can any of you guys and gals tell me
what type of rim this actually is? Because I could only find 1 picture of it on the
web. I would like to add an air valve to the rim but don;t know where to place it.I still wanted
more speckles so I handpainted some of them by using the Citadel paint. The brush mad by Kolinsky
is a real treat to use. As I've said before, I like to use a big brush as it loads up more
paint.
Brushes like these have very sharp point, so you can still do very detailed work with it
whilst not having to dip it in the jar after every dot. I assume the center of the rim is made
of metal, hence I painted it rusty brown. The bolts got a lighter rust tone. I applied another
grey wash to make the shadows a bit starker. And with that stage one of the weathering is done! My Mini will be in a small field in the diorama,
so the tires will be dirty. I picked Birmingham, in the UK, as a location and I studied ground
colours at that place. By the way, you mostly get news pictures of polluted soil when googling. I
mix different pigment types until I get a desired look. Putting a bit of Vallejo Airbrush Thinner on
my brush and hen dab it into the mix of pigments. This is a bit of a rough business, but that
doesn't matter, because we will adjust that later. Just smear a bit of thinner on places
where you want the tire to be cleaner and dab pigments off it with
a cotton bud or your brush. tires are quite heavy you know…
So this working
woth pigments is rather simple and you can correct it at your liking. Just use more thinner if you
want it to be less dirty, or add some pigments to the thinner if you want it dirtier. You really
can't go wrong here. I think it is nice how all the details on the tire get highlighted
because of the pigment that stays behind it, as you can see on the tire thread and
the raised letters on the side wall. MIG Oilbrushers maybe look like a tool
for the eye lashes of your girlfirend, but actually are very handy.
Of course you
can use oil paints like Abteilung 502, but with these you don't have to wait until the oil
has drained out. As my Mini is dying in a field, algae will be present. I dab a bit of the paint
on a scrap piece of plastic and then dilute it white odourless thinner. The algae will be there
where rain water tends to accumulate the most. The MIG Oil paint dries way quicker than Abteilung
502 paint or the like. But you still have plenty of time to adjust the amount of paint, more than
using acrylic pigments. Lastly I add some Starship Filth as you know there are plenty of starships
around Birmingham. No, it's a nice colour to add a road dirt and brake dust look. I think
we are ready for some end shots, aren't we? I hope you liked what you saw and if you did, would you please gently touch that thumbs up
button below the video? You can also help to make this show possible by supporting me on
Patreon.
This will get you lots of goodies. If you want to know how to do rust weathering,
click on this video. And this video is cool too! It really is. Come on. Click!.
