Landships II

I did mention in the past about building an outdoor monument tank like they put up in many British cities and towns after WW1 as described in the Osprey books about the British rhomboid tanks.  Most of these would be destroyed in the subsequent decades, and the version I am building, the Mark III, were all destroyed.  What I intend to depict is the dedication ceremony, with the tanks presumably gussied up for the occasion.

Yes, it's meant to be humorous.  In actual history, most of the tanks used for monuments never saw combat service, so during the dedication ceremonies a fictitious story was made up for each tank.  No Mark III ever left Britain, let alone saw combat, so this would amplify the joke.  And in real life at least two Mark III females were known to be used for monument tanks.  (Most tanks used were Mark IV's, but I also felt it easier to backdate the 1/35 Emhar kit than update it to the proper Mark IV.)

Also, the scene is meant to be generic; there were many towns that got tanks so it's a "happened everywhere" scenario.  Since the monument tanks vanished by WW2, if there are any closeup photographs of these that aren't in my Osprey books already, I wouldn't know where to look, other than here.

I know the Maidstone tank had it's WD and Home Service numbers visible at the handing over ceremony. It seems likely that most others did too as many had their numbers visible on photos taken after they were installed in their various locations.

Long Tom, send me your e-mail address and i'll send you the article I need for my local paper on the local Presentation Tank as they were called, a Mk IV Female, which was only used for training - included in the article is the story given to the public about it, despite it obviously being a training tank

Latest development:

Though the one article made it look easy to make the Mark IV to Mark III conversion, in mid-stream I found the process very troublesome and made a miserable hash out of the project.  Sanding between rivet strips I found impossible.  Ouch.

So I decided to make a slight change.  Same concept, but instead I will just use a Mark IV instead, without the unditching rails.  Still some changes that would have to be made to add realism, but the job should be a lot easier this time.

PDA wrote:

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You can buy little resin rivets that you use like decals, if you wanted to save your MkIII. Archer is the name of the company.

If you make the Ashford MkIV Tank - the last surviving 'monument' tank - it has just been renovated based on the Bovington MkIV, which in turn is the one Emhar based their kit on. So it would just need some fake Lewis guns and some hooligans on the roof.

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 The problem was less the rivets than trying to sand smooth the tight areas between the strips.  It was just impossibly awkward, and I got too frustrated and tossed the kit.

So now I'm using my Mark IV Male, which will need a few rivets anyway but should be much easier to do.  I use those from Scale Hardware.