Built by: Harley Richards in Croydon, Surrey, England

Here's something I'd never realised until recently: the Garbage Truck is actually 1/35 scale or thereabouts and not 1/24 as the box would have us believe. Granted the wheels and tyres are Monogram's standard 1/24 issue parts but everything is a whole lot smaller.

"So what?" I hear you ask. Well, once I realised its true scale I started looking for things I could bash it with and came upon an old MPC Chevy pickup truck. The Chevy donated its bed and a few other bits and pretty much everything else came out of the Garbage Truck. The plan was to have it complete for the Tom Daniel Contest but things just didn't work out.

I thought it might be fun to make the cab less of a show item and something more stock looking and practical. Hopefully everyone will look at it and still recognise it as a Garbage Truck (or the front half at least). In fact it's been severely hacked about but I've tried to retain the essential ingredients of TD's original design. So, it lost the blower, the hood intakes were opened up, as was the scuttle air intake, the hood was scribed into place, the fenders were narrowed, the mirrors and horns were binned, the doors were scribed (as per the box art), the rear window was added along with the front and rear "glass", the lower edges of the rear of the cab were reprofiled, the exhausts were changed and the grille was trimmed to provide clearance for the tyres. All that work to make a showrod look like a production vehicle, what was I doing?

And I'll let the styrene historians figure out where a 1/35 off-road Triumph came from!