Next job was to construct the floor. Careful look at photos of the interior of the AEC Regal show that the floor is raised over the rear wheels and raised again for the rear most seats. I constructed the floor from MDF.
Thin strips of pine used to form the walk ways to the same layout as the original
Seats
The original 10T10 had 30 seat capacity in two rows of double bench seats. 8 doubles on the offside and 7 doubles on the nearside. the first two bench seats on the nearside were slightly narrower than the others to allow room for the sliding passenger door.
I wanted to make the seats as authentic looking as possible and considered using Brass Rod. This was extremely expensive when you worked out the cost for 15 bench seats so I looked for alternatives and chose to use alloy wire coat hangers which I bought in quantity quite cheaply.
So ready to go I made a Jig, cut up the coat hangers and started bending the shapes. 13 normal size and 2 narrower for the nearside.
Seat frames made I now needed to consider the seat squabs.There was a very distinctive pattern to the material which would be hard to reproduce. I decided to reproduce the pattern in a computer drawing program and then print to a colour laser on to good quality paper. I formed the squabs from pine and covered them in the printed material.
Results of laser printed paper for seat material.
Now I turned my attention to the front of the bus and started to form the radiator, headlights and spotlight.
I had decided to add working lights so this meant more care was needed in the construction. I turned the body of the headlights and spot light on a miniature lathe and centre drilled ready to hold 5mm LEDs.
I started to form the radiator, this is iconic and needed several attempts to get it right.
Here the radiator is too shiny and the logo area too large. (These errors get altered later in the model construction). Also you can see I started to make the bonnet. My idea was to house the batteries for the lighting inside the bonnet with access from the radiator hinging down.
