In the last few years I've done a lot of customising on the 3880 fire engines I own, so much so that actually playing with them in the sense of photo stories and additions to my website have lost out. When I bought my first of the new fire engines (a 4821 pump) I decided that I wouldn't do any custom work on it or any other new ones other than by adding equipment and minor modifications such as the resiting of the giraffe light on the rear door and reducing the lighting head to two floodlights from four. So far, I'm sticking to my decision fairly well, although there are a couple of minor custom changes I'm going to make to the 4820 turntable ladder. I have, however, made a couple of small custom pieces of equipment for the new pumpers and here they are.
The first one is a CAFS branch. CAFS stands for
Compressed
Air
Foam
System and is a fairly new idea in the UK. (I don't know how far it is used abroad.) CAFS involves a special foam tank and adaptor mechanism on the fire engine's high pressure hose reel system so that the mixture coming out of the nozzle is 85% compressed air with the rest a mixture of water and foam. This system has the advantage of extinguishing a fire faster and with less water (and, therefore, less water damage). It can also be used to coat nearby buildings with foam to protect them from the radiated heat of a nearby fire.
Here are some links:
http://www.merseyfire.gov.uk/aspx/pages/video/CAFS-video.aspxhttp://www.kent.fire-uk.org/about_us/what_we_do/emergency_response/firefighting/compressed_air_foam_cafs.aspxhttp://www.worthingherald.co.uk/heraldtv/VIDEO-Worthing-fire-crew39s-amazing.4455477.jpIf you only look at one, I'd recommend the last one.
The first photo shows a CAFS branch and the second shows one of my crew about to test the system. The black section is part nozzle and part silencer as the system is noisy because of the compressed air. The whole piece is made from a yellow hose branch and the telephoto lens from the camera set. I may try another attempt keeping the nozzle/silence section longer and cutting the yellow body under the upper handle so that the effect overall is more like the photo of the real thing. Strictly speaking, too, the hose should be black as it is a high pressure one (it should also be small bore) and I'm looking for longer lengths of black Playmobil type hose to use.
The second small custom is actually an adaptation of one of Tim_W's here:
http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=837.0I suddenly realised last night that the barbecue tongs (which the pedal cutter itself is) might fit directly into the equipment holder of the new rescue equipment - and so it did!
