AFV Club 35034 U.S. Army M35A1 Quad .50 Gun Truck
John Prigent
Well,
I suppose the first question anyone will have
is: is this an M35A1 or just the M35A2 that AFV Club issued before?
The answer is, an M35A1. The
significant visible differences are the exhaust arrangements and the Vietnam
period rear lights, and both are included on a new sprue together with
the cab and body side armour and some other small parts.
This of course means that Vietnam fans can build a reasonably accurate
M35A1 straight out of the box just by leaving of the armour and gun parts.
The M35A1 and A2 actually had different engines, but since there's no
engine in the kit this doesn't matter, and
I believe that the two tie-down loops each side of the rear chassis were also
different though I have no details of them.
What
else is in the box? The complete
M35A1 kit, obviously, and it’s still good.
Also a new sprue with the quad .50 gun turret and two sprues of ammo
boxes - .30, .50 and I think 40mm as well.
These come as single boxes and in blocks, and are intended to fill up the
truck's cargo bed round the gun. The
snag here is that Nancy, according to the photos shown on the Guntruck.com site
(www.guntruck.com, an excellent
reference), had the complete trailer-mounted quad .50 fitted into a steel box.
Neither the trailer nor the steel box are given in this kit.
Ho hum. A steel box is easy
to make from plastic card, a bit longer than the actual cargo body so the tail
gate has to be fitted down, but not hanging past the end of the tail gate
itself. The missing trailer is a
bit more problematical, and the best thing seems to be to use the supplied ammo
boxes to cover up its absence – or to wait for someone to produce the trailer
in resin.
There
should also be an armour plate behind the gunner's back, and this can easily
be added with plastic card. The
decal sheet looks good, but examination of the photos quoted shows that the
flower emblem is not quite correct and the face on the gun turret seems to be
different too. Here I think we are
in the realm of variations after damage had been repaired.
The decals certainly seem to me to look like the markings shown in the
small photos reproduced in Squadron/Signal's book Gun Trucks, so there seems
no reason to add the gunner's back armour unless you really want to amend the
markings.
Any
other problems? No, only the
expected knock-out pin marks which will need attention with filler.
This should build into a nice model, but it’s a shame about that
trailer mount. Recommended with reservations. |