1:35 French Armored Carrier UE & Stowage (tamiya)

Load and equipment for the French UE tracked tractor

The resin castings add to a model what the real vehicles carried on the bed and along the sides: rolled tarpaulins, crates, jerrycans and the crew's personal belongings. Without them every vehicle looks as if it had just been driven out of the factory. A loaded machine, by contrast, tells a story at once and gives a scene both scale and variety of color. The set is intended for the Tamiya kit.

The smallest tracked vehicle of the French army

This small armored tractor was created at the beginning of the 1930s as a means of carrying ammunition right up to the firing line. A two-man crew sat very low under two armored domes and the vehicle towed a trailer with a tipping bed behind it. After 1940 hundreds of these machines fell into German hands and the Wehrmacht went on using them, mainly as tractors for anti-tank guns and as load carriers in the second echelon. It is precisely in German colors that the machine appears most often at modeling shows.

Resin castings and how to handle them

First wash the parts in warm water with detergent, so that the release agent from the mold disappears, otherwise the paint adheres poorly. Cut the casting blocks off with a saw and level the surface with a file, ideally wet because of the dust. They are glued with cyanoacrylate glue, as cement for plastic will not help here.

When the set makes most sense

• When building a scene where the vehicle is supplying a firing position
• For modelers who want to fill an empty bed
• As a colorful counterweight to the monotonous finish of a vehicle
• For builders of captured German equipment of French origin