Jeep – Follow Me
This is Hasegawa’s FOLLOW ME ‘Jeep’, which I believe has been around since 2006.
Hasegawa released a few 1/48 non-aircraft back in the early 2000s’, such as a fuel truck and this jeep. Mostly items that can be posed next to 1/48 aircraft.
I decided to build this jeep part of diorama with Tamiya’s airfield fuel truck, and to use a different scheme that I copied off from the Internet instead of the one provided in the kit. The best part of this kit is the detailed engine and radio stack, but of course there’s always room for improvement. Most of the basic components are already in the kit, but adding misc. piping with solder and lead wire
Using spare PE, I cut them to recreate bracing brackets for the radiator grill area.
Adding the middle bracing rod and misc decals finishes up the engine area.
The next area to detail was the radio stack behind the front seat. Again, fairly good detail to begin with, careful painting and decals brought out the details. Added some wiring and tools from the spare box.
How about headphones? They were borrowed from Tamiya German tank crew set and twisted thin copper wiring was the cord. Flattened solder was added to make a hook for the headset.
My jeep is going to be yellow checked, so I did not use the included red/white decals, instead I painted everything black and using tamiya tape as spacing, masked the check the rows followed by a spray with black. Masked agains to finish the checker patterm. It was quite tedious and as you can see, some bleed through that needed to be fixed up.
Next up is the mechanic working on the jeep, this came from a CMK 3 figure kit, done quite well. He’s holding tools from some PE set, I think it was from the Tamiya tank crew set also. Painting figures in this scale, definitely a work in progress, but getting a LITTLE better each time. Happy with multiple thin layered shading to add shadows into the arm and face area.
Some weathering, an antenna with stiff wiring, and finally decals.
The last touch was to replicate the ‘follow me’ sign that many of these jeeps had, I downloaded an image from that era and added text in photoshop. Printed out on white decal paper and mounted it on