Australian TV series - The Feds.

Back in the early 90's, I was asked if I could build a 1/4 scale tanker truck that has to blow up, for a TV series....

.... Absolutely I could. One catch, I had 2 weeks to do it in and next to no budget. No worries.

It was a static model that just had to blow up, so no working parts. Only detailed on one side and no interior. Detail was also minimal as they shot the real truck first then cut to the model. The model was only seen for a moment before exploding.

I remember possibly 4 people working on this. It was all built out of wood for speed. Luckily I had tyres that were almost perfect... close enough.

The exploding part was a very light wood frame wrapped in a layer of thin foil, then paper and another layer of foil.

The foil by itself was too light and so I beefed it up. Mainly for the reason that it had to hold the shape of the tank without collapsing.

It was freighted from to Gold Coast to a location in Melbourne. There was no time for testing so it was all our best guess.

I sent a sample of the tank to the pyro guys (seen here setting it up) and they also had to give it their best guess as we only had one chance at this.

The end result looked pretty good. I would like to have had a little more time to set up a rig to push the cab forward as it exploded. They did though get a good shot for the time and budget they allowed.