Van Body Truck

I am working on the WWII US Army truck collection and those from the immediate post war era too.

Mostly they are getting repaired, assembled, converted or restored as needed.

Then they get an overall spray paint of olive drab, from Testors.

After that painting engine grilles, tires, windshields, canvas get the paint brush.  Mostly Tamiya but Testors spray paint and jar paint for the olive drab.  The spray and jar are a perfect match and very little change over 40+ years of using it too.  Windshields get painted Tamiya gloss black.  If you look at a windshield on a vehicle on a sunny day they often look black because it is usually darker in the vehicle than outside.

A while back I took some damaged Roco Dodge trucks, both the ambulance and the cargo box version and used the cabs to make a pre-WWII American halftrack, four of them actually.

So what to do with the leftover Dodge parts?

After scrounging around my spares and junkyard I found a few different truck cabs from various sources.

So in this case the former ambulance body became a van truck on a sort of pick up truck cab.

The cab is resin and the van is Roco, held together with bits of plastic and epoxy.

The US Army used lots of little van body trucks for small arms repair, electronics repair, and many other supply and maintenance tasks.  Civilian automobile and truck manufacturing was stopped in early 1942 and all the different car and truck companies made vehicles for the military for most of the war.

If you review any of the standard catalogs of military vehicles they are filled with odd little trucks, not unlike this one.  And now I have one.  Airfix USAAF military policeman.