Mercedes 1850L Project

Page 2: Painting and Finishing

The one color Cobalt Blue paint scheme might seem quite simple, but that doesn't make it easy. I started with the box. Because it consists of a combination of metal and plastic, I chose to prime it white first. I also decided to paint it already assembled rather than paint the parts separately. This results in paint on the fasteners as well, however I left out the rear door latch hardware so it would still appear metallic. The hardest part of the whole project was the application of the huge stickers on the side of the box. It is always hard to apply large stickers without bubbles, but the presence of the corrugations makes it even worse. The other side effect of the corrugations is that is very easy to see if the sticker is not straight because it will not line up. You only get one chance to put down the sticker straight and then smooth it out. After I was done, I applied clear coat to the whole thing.

Here's the fully decorated box attached to the chassis. The side rails you see between the front and rear axles actually hang from the box so they needed to be painted flat black and attached now as well.

Tail lights are always tricky. I started by assembling them to the rear bumper and spraying the whole thing flat black. After that I used a brush to apply chrome silver paint inside the light buckets. The lenses come off the tree clear, so I applied transparent red and amber paint as shown. Note the entire inner third of the lens ends up lighting up white with the reverse lights even though it should really be split into a reverse light and an inner tail light. The right hand picture shows all of this installed in the truck along with the license plates, mud flaps, and stickers.

The fuel tank on the right side of the chassis got replaced by an MFC control panel, but the oil (or air?) tanks and battery box on the left side remain. I painted them flat black and applied the stickers as shown.

The front fenders are separate parts from the cab. I painted them with semi-gloss black and applied some amber marker stickers. There is no mechanical attachment between these parts and the cab; the little tab on top just sticks on with double sided tape.

Quite a bit of painting is required to make the headlights look good. First you need to surround all the lenses with flat black. The amber markers are intended to be stickers, but I don't think this looks very good so instead I painted them transparent orange as shown on the left. I still used the black portion of the sticker as a divider though. You can see the final result on the right. I also chose to paint some of the fog lights yellow for some variety, and also because I saw some pictures of real Mercedes trucks using this scheme.

Here are the lenses installed in the front bumper. You can see that I screwed up the yellow lenses. I should have painted both outside lenses but instead I painted both right lenses. I had to go back and fix them later. The right hand image shows the completed (but not corrected) bumper on the truck.

The grille needs some careful painting. The border is blue but the slats are flat black. The Mercedes star is a separate plated part, as are the side air deflectors. The dash board is also nicely detailed, although it is almost completely unseen once the cab is assembled. The windows are tinted so the interior is not very visible.

Painting the mostly cubic cab was way more work than I expected because all the window trim (and some other details) needs to be black. I started by painting the whole thing cobalt blue on the outside, then masked everything that didn't need to be black. This involved a lot of trimming as you can see. I also painted the whole inside surface black so no white plastic could be seen. The final result is on the right. This took a couple of days.

The striped decals in this kit come in two colors: silver and maroon. Presumably the colored versions are intended to be used with a more neutral paint scheme. With the stickers applied, I put several coats of clear over the top. The picture on the right shows the completed wind deflector. This picture does a good job of showing the reflectivity of the clear coat.

The completed cab includes the main "cube", the wind deflector, a sun screen, side mirrors, and the grille. The interior is also attached directly to the cab (rather than to the floor) so it tips up with the cab. On the right the whole truck has been painted and assembled.

Here are closeup views of the front and rear of the truck. You can see that I've fixed the wrongly painted yellow fog light and I've also added windshield wipers (taped in position while they dry). From the back you can see the bumper, mud flaps, tail lights, and the door latching mechanism.

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