Building a Rapid Fire! Finnish Army HQ - Part 5

Supply truck conversion - cheap Ford-Werke V3000 (Pt.4)
I said that I was going to finish off the cab conversion next...I lied! I love working with plasticard and couldn't resist building the new truck flatbed instead.

Basically the Pegasus US Army Truck model has a completely different flatbed arrangement than the Ford V3000. It's slightly longer, has a different design for the sides of the cargo bed and doesn't have the additional wooden side-planks that are indicative of a 'stake truck' design.

Luckily it's a very simple build to convert the GMC type truck to a stake truck type, I simply sanded down the original flat-bed side detail so the sides were flat and then added four plasticard strips on each side. I next added the four vertical side supports and then added three wider spaced strips at the top for the stake sides.

Above: One side of the stake truck design complete, here you can see
my mark up for the next side.

The stake truck feature seem to be mostly a design that is indicative of commercial trucks of the time. Pre-war designs by Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, etc were pressed into military service by the Finns and these seemed to be identifiable from specialist military trucks because of their lack of 'tilt covers' (canvas covered cargo beds).

My stake truck build is - like everything in this build - a bit of a fudge, but bears a passable resemblance to the real thing hopefully. As said one of the main differences is the length of the GMC cargo bed and also the inclusion in the Pegasus kit of troop benches on either side of the cargo area. I thought about cutting these out as my truck is supposed to be a cargo truck and not a troop carrier, but these benches are integral to the design of the GMC kit design and would result in my having to completely rebuilding the sides of the flat bed.

Above: Here you can see the original Pegasus troop benches (with holes for the
original side struts). I decided to leave these but I added some floor planking and
am using the original tail gate (but may add plank cladding to this).

Finally, to give a bit of character to the flat bed floor, I added some plastic strips to resemble floor planking. Easy. To roughen up all of the plasticard strips used in order to give them a 'wood' texture I coated them all with some thin coats of liquid poly cement, this slightly melted the surface plastic to give it a mottled effect.