Greetings all. I thought I’d share a few photos of my all paper, self designed, Holt 1-man tank realized in @ 1/24 scale. There isn’t too much information out there about this little parade tank - a Youtube video, a few black and white photos, and a wikipedia article. From what I’ve gleaned, it was used primarily as a Red Cross fund raising gimic during the WWI years. It was built almost entirely of wood (including the tracks), and was powered by a motorcycle engine. The “guns” were simple mock ups, made from pipe or possibly heavy cardboard tubes. It appears to have had at least two different liveries during it’s life. One with the name Holt (Benjamin Holt) and the logo for the future Caterpillar Corporation prominently displayed. The other with US ARMY and the designation H.A. 36 painted on the gun sponsons. There were wild rumors spurred by a Popular Mechanics magazine cover that the H.A. 36 was a new weapon that was going to be built in mass numbers, and deployed to Europe to sweep the “hun” from the red fields of France.
I’m not sure of its exact dimensions, but comparing it with the people in the photos and video, I estimated that it was somewhere around 4 feet high, and about 6 feet long. It could be a little larger than that (people were smaller then). I used Photoshop to draw and color the parts. I managed to fit all the parts onto one piece of letter sized paper. For the guns, paper Q-tip shafts were sanded to shape with an emery board, and then covered with matching colored printer paper. All the little circular greebles around the track sides were laminated to .3mm cardboard and were cut out with a leather punch.
I was originally going to display it on a brick road section with a streetlight for a scale reference, but I got lazy and bored at the end and resorted to simple groundwork on a redwood textured paper base.
The first photo is “in process” and is included to provide sense of scale.
