Danko is a medium-sized company in the USA, based in the small town of Snyder in the state of Nebraska. The family business has existed since 1974 and builds high-quality fire-fighting vehicles such as tankers, tanker/pumpers, rapid attack and rescue vehicles, skid units, wildland vehicles and also vehicles for airports. The rapid attack and rescue vehicles include models built on pickup trucks.
And exactly this vehicle will be one of my next models. In the 1980s I had already built a mini pumper based on a pickup truck and wrote a report about it for Modell Magazin. While looking for a nice and appealing model, I came across this vehicle. Meng had released the Ford F-350 as a 1:24 scale kit, which I unfortunately missed. I was still able to get two kits, and they will serve me for my conversion.
This is what the kit looks like. It will be converted from a pickup with a flatbed into a mini pumper like the one shown above. There is just one small catch: the vehicle pictured above is a Ford F-550, not an F-350, so I have to make a compromise. The differences are hardly visible on a model and, on the real vehicle, concern the engine output. The cab of the F-350 is a few centimeters shorter, which on the model amounts to only a few millimeters. When the time comes, I will show the build of this model in the Wettringer Forum and describe it in detail.
And what do you need to build a model like this? An accurate drawing, of course, which I have meanwhile had sent to me. The head of Danko, Mark Kreikemeier, sent it to me personally, along with some photos that I needed to produce the decals.
You will find the conversion report in the Wettringer Modellbauforum under this link:
https://www.wettringer-modellbauforum.de/forum/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=73752
This type of fire truck would be ideal for some fire departments in Germany that have to turn out particularly often to fight wildfires. The Ford F-550 is powerful, has four-wheel drive and can carry 4-5 people. It has a rapid attack system, a fire monitor and a 1,200-liter water tank, making it ideal for a quick response when a fire breaks out, and not only for forest or other wildfires. Smaller fires, such as a car fire on the motorway, could be reached quickly with this vehicle. In Germany, at least, pickups are still rarely used as the basis for fire-fighting vehicles, as there is no large selection of suitable models. The American Ford F-series pickups are larger than the Mercedes X-Class, VW Amarok, Nissan Navara, Mitsubishi L200, Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux or Isuzu D-Max.
The Wabash Twp. Fire Department bought the mini pumper in 2018 and paid 239,000 US dollars for it.
Finished! I worked on this model from June 2022 to mid-April 2023. The Ford chassis was lengthened and the fire-fighting body was then mounted on it.