Poseur De Pont - AMX-13 bodging Part 3

A quick blast of spray paint and my new bridgelayer is ready for action!

All ready to er, pose it's pont I suppose.

 Here a pair of French officers look it over during acceptance trials.  Let's listen in....

 "Mais le pont est en plastique de merde - et c'est un camion de métal. Entend-il prendre du poids?"*

"Eh bien Christ remercier pour cela. Si elle avait rompu que c'était ma pension de descendre aux chiottes!"**

Don't you just love a happy ending?





*  But the bridge is plastic crap - and that's a truckload of metal. Will it take the weight?

** Well thank Christ for that.  If it had broken that was my pension going down the crapper!

ASU-57 air portable assault gun - part 2

Remember my 1/43 scale ASU?  If so, you will have noticed that I completely forgot about it!  Anyway, the thing was completed a while ago so here it is in all it's tiny glory.

 It really is tiny - here for comparison is a Dinky Leopard is more or less the same scale.

Poseur De Pont - AMX-13 bodging Part 2

As a couple of you correctly guessed, my AMX is on it's way to becoming a bridgelayer.  Or to use the correct title: AMX-13 PDP (Poseur De Pont) Modèle 51.  Poseur De Pont.  You have to love that. name.

This being me, the model will bear only a passing resemblance to the real deal - but we will end up with a AMX hull with a bridge section on the roof.  The bridge section in question comes from our old friend the Matchbox AVRE kit - but suitable widened and strengthened to support die-cast 1/48ish scale tanks.  I'm not after a scale replica here - rather a working wargames bridgelayer.

To support it I knocked up a box section of plastic card.

Sleek eh?  I am consoled by the fact that the real thing looks like a lash-up too!

I wonder if it will look any better painted?

AMX-13 bodging

You may remember my £0.99 AMX-13 DCA a few months back.  Well, I found another one.  Same price.  As I don't really need another DCA (the AA variant) I settled on another plan - which would involve removing the turret.  This meant I had to dismantle the thing - as can be seen in the photos.

This process has certainly increased my appreciation of these Solido models - they are rather cleverly thought-out models.

But what of the AMX-13's future?  More on that coming soon....