Leaderboard

Now onto the rear axles, suspension, hubs and brakes. The main chassis color is Tamiya Semi Gloss Black. There’s a couple other shades of black, and also Tamiya Rubber Black (a very realistic color) used on the air bags. The rear axles needed a sleeve of wider tubing to fit the wheel hubs. Those beautiful real aluminum hubs are from M&R Wheels. Highly recommended, they make excellent products. I got the M&R hubs to go with the Keystone Aluminum Peterbilt Alcoa wheels, which are fantastic, but didn’t come with hubs with a socket for the axle stubs. I probably could have figured out a way to make the Keystone hubs work, but M&R provided a much simpler option. More about the wheels in a later post. I added resin Bendix Air Disc Brake assemblies from Moluminum. Drilled them out to fit over the hub axle mounts. I included air lines to the brake chambers, and ran the lines up to the frame rails. I didn’t bother running lines further than that, because, well, none of this area of the chassis will be seen on the completed model unless you turn it upside down. Not planning on that. The frame rails are mostly devoid of bolt detail for the same reason. In fact, on the rear axles, all you’ll see is the outside wheels and tires. But, I guess when the build is finished, I’ll know the brakes and lines are there and that’s what matters. But, I sometimes have to ask myself “does it matter when you won’t see it?” After all, this project has been about striking a balance between the sane and crazy, right? The front axle has disc brakes, too. I painted and decaled the shocks to represent Bilstein commercial truck and coach shocks. The front brake assemblies were also run with lines, along with the air bags. Air Bag Levelers were added using bits from the parts box. These details make more sense because they will be seen when you tilt the hood. The air lines to the bags are braided line from Detail master with their fittings connecting to the mounts and to the frame rails. The resin air bags are brush painted in Tamiya rubber black. I opted to go with solid bags rather than rubber ones because of the potential amount of weight they’ll need to support. The hubs are fixed in place, not enabling the model to roll, though the front axle steering is functional. I like rolling models, but the vast majority of the time I glue the wheels in place because they can usually be positioned better (plumb and square) that way and they won’t roll off a shelf.