Many years ago, I bought a Resicast armoured bulldozer kit second-hand, and fairly soon also actually built it. I made some alterations to it to match a well-known picture of an armoured bulldozer:
[ATTACH]427018[/ATTACH]
After applying a coat of paint, though, the build stalled. Mostly, this was because I wasn’t satisfied with the model’s colour but couldn’t find anything I thought was better. That, in turn, was partly due to lack of good information on the colour in which the real thing would have been painted. Since then, I did learn that, and also that the British Army used multiple types of armoured bulldozers. And unfortunately for me, the one in the photo above is a D6A while Resicast’s kit is of a D7A. The main visual difference is the positions of the pipes on the bonnet, but in real life the D6A is a lot smaller than the D7A and the shape of its armoured cabin is subtly different as well (other than being smaller too, of course).
So, I undid the conversion work again by removing the pipes, filling the holes I made for them and making new ones in the correct locations instead. I now decided on modelling another armoured dozer from the Westkapelle landings on 1 November 1944:
[ATTACH]427015[/ATTACH]
This is the dozer that was carried in LCT 980, and which apparently had a Canadian crew, so probably came from a Royal Canadian Engineers unit attached to the landing force. The picture is a still from about five seconds of film that shows it pushing against the LCT’s bow ramp (visible in the foreground) to shove it back into the sea.
Unfortunately, it also shows this bulldozer has stowage racks on the sides of the armoured cab and seems to have carried a fair amount of junk on the back of it, stowed above the winch. I therefore had to estimate the size and shape of those racks, then build them:
[ATTACH]427016[/ATTACH][ATTACH]427017[/ATTACH]
The racks were made by cutting up thin 1 mm plastic strip using my RP Toolz guillotine chopper tool, into lengths of 7.5 mm, 10 mm and 20 mm, then gluing them together. That was a job I was glad to see the back of … I won’t make any claims about their accuracy, as the film clip doesn’t really show more than what you can see in the screenshot above — though going back and forth through it does make some details better visible. This is just my best guess as to a reasonable shape and size, and which seems believable.
Now it’s ready for paint (again), and of course adding the various stowage that’s visible in the film clip.
[ATTACH]427018[/ATTACH]
After applying a coat of paint, though, the build stalled. Mostly, this was because I wasn’t satisfied with the model’s colour but couldn’t find anything I thought was better. That, in turn, was partly due to lack of good information on the colour in which the real thing would have been painted. Since then, I did learn that, and also that the British Army used multiple types of armoured bulldozers. And unfortunately for me, the one in the photo above is a D6A while Resicast’s kit is of a D7A. The main visual difference is the positions of the pipes on the bonnet, but in real life the D6A is a lot smaller than the D7A and the shape of its armoured cabin is subtly different as well (other than being smaller too, of course).
So, I undid the conversion work again by removing the pipes, filling the holes I made for them and making new ones in the correct locations instead. I now decided on modelling another armoured dozer from the Westkapelle landings on 1 November 1944:
[ATTACH]427015[/ATTACH]
This is the dozer that was carried in LCT 980, and which apparently had a Canadian crew, so probably came from a Royal Canadian Engineers unit attached to the landing force. The picture is a still from about five seconds of film that shows it pushing against the LCT’s bow ramp (visible in the foreground) to shove it back into the sea.
Unfortunately, it also shows this bulldozer has stowage racks on the sides of the armoured cab and seems to have carried a fair amount of junk on the back of it, stowed above the winch. I therefore had to estimate the size and shape of those racks, then build them:
[ATTACH]427016[/ATTACH][ATTACH]427017[/ATTACH]
The racks were made by cutting up thin 1 mm plastic strip using my RP Toolz guillotine chopper tool, into lengths of 7.5 mm, 10 mm and 20 mm, then gluing them together. That was a job I was glad to see the back of … I won’t make any claims about their accuracy, as the film clip doesn’t really show more than what you can see in the screenshot above — though going back and forth through it does make some details better visible. This is just my best guess as to a reasonable shape and size, and which seems believable.
Now it’s ready for paint (again), and of course adding the various stowage that’s visible in the film clip.
My interest of recent years in the war in my part of the world helped too, of course.
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