I've been working on a project for my Redford Theatre Christmas display layout recently. I contacted Andre Garcia of River Leaf Models about making a model kit of the horse barn in Greenfield Village my girlfriend works at. Hopefully he'll get caught up with the post-York madness and have time to get to it
Anyway, the crew at the barn has an assigned Model AA dump truck they use in their daily chores. They use it to haul hay out to the horse pastures in the back-40 and also for bringing horses up to the barn from the pastures. Of course it's also used for road clean-up duty. I never found an O scale model of a Model AA dump truck in the U.S. Market, but I managed to get one from the Ukraine on Ebay. It's a Russian model of the Ford truck, which I read about recently.
A photo of the prototype truck I took while a coworke and I were moving a pile of coal out of the farm field that had been used to feed the Port Huron steam tractor that was out plowing and threshing the weekend before. The photo shows it dumping the load into the receiving pit of our 50 ton coaling tower.
The model started life as a Russian Army truck.
I removed the tarp cover with a razor saw and also shortened the bed and truck frame to better match the prototype.
The finished product... I sanded off the wooden bed details to represent the steel bed on the prototype better. Obviously I also painted the bed black and repainted the cab red as seen on the real thing. I have a set of hay bales on order to go in the back to finish it off. In the background is a paper full scale printout of the front of the barn building this is going to go with.
