I’m planning on building a diorama featuring the 30CWT Canadian Chevrolet truck used by the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa. The model itself is the Dragon Models 1/72 scale plastic kit, and I’ve got that part of the diorama finished, so I thought I’d post a few pix of it here. The dio is going to be fairly simple, set in the desert, with a few Commonwealth LRDG personnel and a lot of sand to add some realism.
With the 10ml Tamiya paint pot for scale, it’s a little model.
This is the version of the model with the 20mm Breda AA gun in the back. There’s also one available with a Lewis gun. The kit went together quite well, but the instructions aren’t that helpful, so reading build reports by other, much more experienced, modellers online definitely helped me avoid several mistakes.
I’m a beginner when it comes to scratch-building stuff, so I limited myself to the swags and other bags of gear carried on the truck. They’re made from modeller’s clay, the type that you bake in an oven for about 30 minutes after you’ve moulded it.
The weathering is also beginner’s basic stuff. Just finely grated soft pastels dissolved in rubbing alcohol, thinned with a dash of water and painted on.
I’m an Aussie, not a Kiwi, but it was the very strong Kiwi connection with the history of the Long Range Desert Group that got me interested in the topic in the first place. All Kiwis should be very proud of these guys. I’m currently reading a book on the LRDG, and while it probably won’t change my simple little diorama all that much, the combination of reading about a topic while I slowly build a truck and a diorama about it makes it a very enjoyable month or two of modelling and reading.
