What Has Mike Been Working On?

For the last two years I have been working on catching up with projects that have been languishing, in some cases for 20 years or more.  This is my M47 tank project.  I had to buy a few more to get as many as I needed.  The plan is to have a full battalion of 54, an "anti-tank" company of 20, an additional company of 17 tanks using vehicle modifications that were not generally fielded by the US Army but were tested or at least studied.  Most of those are not yet finished.  I also wanted two reconnaissance units with one M47 each.  One unit in Arctic white and the other in olive drab like the rest of these tanks.  I also did three M47 as Tiger II tanks for the movie The Battle of the Bulge.

My World War One, Interwar, and World War Two artillery was in need of some work.  So you see a lot of towed artillery here.  They include 4.2 inch gun conversions of the Roco 155mm towed howitzer, several versions of the French 75mm gun, and several version of the Roco 105mm towed howitzer.  Some of them are conversions to the initial production version with small shield and wooden wagon wheels.  Others have been converted to the Airborne 105mm howitzer with the short barrel and no shield.

My spares box was filled with junk truck parts and so I cobbled together a number of different radar, and communication van vehicles.  There is also a bunch of Heiser 2 1/2 ton trucks built just as stock trucks, a few Roco 37mm AT guns, and artillery towing Caterpillar tractors.  The upper left corner are some toys made in the 1930s that I use for huge coast defense mortars.

I am also working on my Sherman tanks.  I purchases and built a full battalion of Heiser Models Sherman M4A3 tanks and built them all as identical versions. Then I built and tidied up all my remaining Shermans and Sherman bits from the spares box.  Most of these are primer painted waiting for the olive drab.

Now I am building Lee tanks and here is some of the progress on that project.  Not pictured are a bunch of other trucks and artillery that is not finished getting painted.