ESCI Valentine towing Milicast 6 pdr.

gamevender · June 18, 2020

I saw a couple photos of this pairing from the Tunisian campaign and decided I wanted to do a model of it. The ESCI Valentine kit is very fiddly to get all the parts to fit correctly, but with much care, builds up nicely. I removed all the molded in handles and replace then from thin wire and this version has the length and link hard plastic tracks, which were very easy to work with, especially since I could leave off the entire top run of track as it was hidden by the sand shields. Speaking of which, I sanded off the molded in sand shield supports and replaced them with strip plastic.As it is towing the AT gun, I needed to add a towing bar to the rear which I made out of a truck spring suspension part. The Milicast 6 pdr. is much better than the old Airfix offering, but has a lot of flash and molding voids, like on mine the entire end of the gun barrel was just flash, so I had to "Dutchman" in a length of plastic rod. It also comes with the muzzle brake, but since the barrel just behind it was just flash, it was easy to remove. Before the 'scale police' chime in, yes I know that ostensibly the kits are in different scales, but I have found that some kits run a little larger/smaller than scale, and these two look fine together.