H is for Half-track

My Artillery tractors lined up, it's a poor photograph I'm afraid. The gun on the left is actually the Matchbox Pak.40, but it was such a simple model next to the others, I gave it a curved shield to make it look more like a Pak.38 with the 50cm barrel.

This is supposed to be a Sd.Kfz10, smaller of the workhorse family, I converted it from the Matchbox Sd.Kfz.11 which was as awful as the gun it accompanied! It was not the most successful of conversions and the bonnet is all wrong, but at the time I was looking to produce war-games vehicles and it 'looked' right. The Nebelwerfer is the Esci one with a canvas weather cover made from tissue, and a battery number painted after a photograph in - I think - Panzer Colours.

In order to escape from the problem of building an interior I couldn't find good images of, I carved a piece of balsa until it fitted snugly against the windscreen and body sides, overlaid Evergreen round section strips as a tilt frame and covered the whole thing in tissue. The flexible PVC windows were represented by squares of draughtsman's paper with the pull-down folds drawn in in faint pencil.

This is the late-war einheits cab/'pick-up' truck variant of the Sd.Kfz.11, based on the Esci kit, and in some respects as amateurish as the previous one, however, in my defence - I only had a fuzzy black & white photograph on the instruction sheet to guide me. There are now some very good pictures of this variant on the Internet. Cab is scratch-built from the bonnet back to represent the 'einheits' wooden cab.

The Esci Kfz.11 straight from the box, note how it can't pull it's own gun properly as the gun is configured for firing only! Compare with the previous image which includes the Fujimi gun, which is configured for travelling. Airfix also made a Pak.40, and the three are all well detailed and about the same size, unlike the Matchbox pixie-gun.