Diamond T 4 Ton Truck. Squadron Walk Round Series

[Shar2]

Diamond T 4 Ton Truck

Squadron Publications Walk Around

Originally designed for the Quartermasters Corps’ need for a prime mover for the 155mm howitzer, the Diamond T truck featured robust construction and a powerful Hercules engine. The Corps found the truck well suited to their needs, in particular as a dump truck, and strongly favoured the Diamond T over the ubiquitous 2.5ton GMC CCKW cargo dump. Unfortunately the Diamond T cost almost twice as much as the CCKW, a considerable hindrance to mass procurement.

In addition to the short wheel base prime movers, dump trucks and general cargo trucks, a long wheel base version of the Diamond T was built for use by the Canadian forces, and the widely used Diamond T 4 ton wrecker shared the shore wheelbase chassis. Serving as the standard US Army wrecker, the Diamond T featured a twin boom wrecker bed, which allowed side recoveries to be made.

The book is printed in Squadron Publications standard landscape format with a short history of the type, but only a couple of photographs of WWII vintage. The rest of the book is dedicated to the very detailed walk rounds of four restored vehicles that are still drivable today. These are the closed cab short wheel base cargo, open cab cargo, closed cab wrecker and open cab wrecker. All the photographs are in full colour and well annotated giving not only descriptions of what’s in the photo, but also explanations on how certain parts worked. The book is very well laid out and printed to a high standard. The condition of the depicted vehicles allows the modeller to build their projects with a high attention to detail, after which they can weather the models to whatever degree they wish.

Conclusion

This is another superb book from Squadron Publications. It’s just a shame that there are so very few kits released to make full use of the detail and information held within the pages. Maybe one day this will be rectified. I can still recommend this book as the quality of the photographs is so good.