LANDING CRAFT , MECHANISED 6 -(LCM6) Let me state from the very start that I am not an expert on Landing Craft. My interest was sparked by attending an IPMS show in Bath in England a couple of years ago where I met a man who was part of the special interest group on landing craft. I was taken by the models that he had made in 1/35th scale out of cardboard and bought an LCM 6 from him purely because it looked big enough to fit a tank in! I didn't know then that I would be spending the next year researching and building my model in plastic. I had an old Time Life book with a fantastic photo of landing craft waiting in a Belgian canal for the Rhine crossing and I thought that I would tidy up the cardboard model, but it just wasn't good enough. I decided to start from scratch and started to look around for more references. I like to trade books at model shows and thought I would be in a good position to find references but there is only one! An old out of print Ian Allen book that didn't have much beyond small scale plans. Enter John Baumann the information officer of MAFVA. with a set of plans that he got many years ago from the Admiralty in London. Without books for reference I tried the internet and found that the most helpful sites with photos were the Australian War Memorial and the US NARA sites. There are hundreds of in action shots from the pacific on these sites, especially the Australian one, and I for one haven't seen many of them before. Armed with what I thought were enough references I made a start. I was originally going to make a full size model and put it on the back of a Dragon Wagon but it leaves an awfully large space inside the LCM and I wanted to try and fill it. My intention is that the model will eventually rest on resin waves on a nice base but I just haven't had time to get round to it yet. Once I had decided to make a waterline model I had to choose where I wanted it to be. I think that I had three choices, either the Pacific, D-Day or the Rhine crossing. The Pacific or D-Day would suggest Navy grey colour schemes and the Rhine crossing olive drab. As I wanted the vehicles to be olive drab that ruled out the Rhine. I recently purchased the LVT 4 so that is going to be my Pacific model, that left D-Day. I can't find any photographic evidence for LCM 6's hitting the beach on the 6th so I decided that my model would be of the follow up forces. At a recent show I picked up the M20 for half price and the Dodge was next to nothing in a bargain box. The only real expense was on the Dragon and Tamiya figures and the Hornet heads. I bought the plastic card at my friends shop so overall this was going to be a cheap project. I am afraid that I did not record exactly what thickness' of card and strip I used. I just used what looked right according to my references. I made the basic shape from very thick card. It was so thick that I had to cut it with a cutting wheel in my mini drill. It is very important to get the basic construction straight and level. No amount of paint and filler can hide fundamental errors. I made the model in a series of sub assemblies. Roughly these were the landing craft itself, the wheelhouse, the ramp, the machine guns and the funnels. The wheelhouse is pretty straightforward although I still don't know what goes on the small shelf in font of the wheel. The ramp was more difficult and it took a couple of goes at bending thick sprue to get the right angle at both ends of the main beam. The machine guns are as close as I could get from photographic evidence and are mostly the result of my punch and die set. The funnels were by far and away the most difficult part of the model which may sound strange considering how small they are but it took me about three weeks just to figure out how to make them. First I made a skeleton of the front and side profile. Then I covered the outside with thin strips like a barrel. I then filled them from the base upwards with filler. I left them for about a week and then very carefully sanded them out from the inside with my mini drill. It was a complete nightmare and I wouldn't do it like that again. To air brush the LCM I mixed up a large jar of a dark bluey-grey from Humbrol and a light batch that was not quite so blue. I thoroughly covered the model with the first colour and then misted over with the lighter second. When it was completely dry I added the markings from letraset and left it aside for a couple of weeks. I weathered it in several ways and in more than one session because of it's size and also because coming back to the project you see it differently each time. I added selected washes mixed from oils, some dark to emphasise detail and some rusty to mimic the effects of the sea. I dry brushed here and there until I thought it looked right and then added quite a lot of scuffs and scratches individually until it looked a bit battered. I was trying to achieve the look of a quite new piece of kit but one that had seen some service. Finally I added some mud, sand and stones to the interior that the tyres would bring in when loading and off loading vehicles. The vehicles are the Italeri Dodge and the Tamiya M20. The Italeri kit is now very old and I believe that the Skybow kit is better but with a little detail work it can still look good. The main things I changed were making the tyres fatter by adding sheet plastic between the two halves of the wheels and sanding all the wings to a more scale appearance. I also added a lead foil canopy. The M20 is a lovely kit and if I made it again I would use some photo etch but it is not absolutely necessary. I added some detail to the interior and some stowage to the rear deck. Both kits were airbrushed with enamels, sorry I didn't keep a note of which ones and I added markings from Archer. The markings are not supposed to be super accurate but just representative. This left the figures. There are just about no sailors out there in 1/35th scale, however Roger Saunders from Hornet models came to the rescue and issued US and British sailor head sets just when I needed them. I used two from the US set and some from the sets of US helmets. The sailor in the wheelhouse and walking down the outside are from the Dragon US tankers set slightly modified and with new resin hands from Historex. The machine gunner is a bit of a frankenstein from the spares box. For the vehicle crews I used the standing officer from the US tankers set with some modified Tamiya infantrymen. Most of the figures got new hands which makes a vast difference and they all got new heads. The faces and hands were painted in oils and the uniforms mostly in enamels so that they looked flat. I hand painted the insignia. This is my first full scratch build and from start to finish the model took about a year. I really enjoyed making it which is what I believe modelling is all about. I now know that some details should be different, but if you have as much trouble as I did gathering data then you may not notice them! Thank you for taking the time to read this. References: Books Time Life World War 2-Across the Rhine (a few stunning photos) Ian Allen Landing Craft of WW2 Tanks Illustrated no 29 US Marine tanks in WW2 pic 53 (only clear overhead wheelhouse shot) Internet www.awm.gov Australian War Memorial (largest on-line picture database 200k plus) www.nara.gov US national archives on-line US 594th Engineers Excellent private reference of Seaman Allee Andy Wright