What next? Chevy radio van?

Despite the fact I really fancied getting back to good old plastic kit making - and I do have a couple of suitable kits for my Finnish Continuation War project - a little model I already had has been niggling me. I bought it as a possible basis for my 1939 Chevy truck project - but in the end did a semi-scratch build.

So, i've had this nice little truck laying around - it's a 1/72 Valiant 'Ready to Roll' resin model of a 1939 Chevrolet 30cwt LRDG truck...

As nice as this little truck is I don't really have any use for it now so I was wondering if I could use it in my Finnish project somehow. And as luck would have it I came across this photo on the SA-Kuva.fi (WW2 Finnish military history) photo resource...

Finnish Army photo, 1941. Source: SA-Kuva

The red arrow in the above photo points to a 1939 Chevrolet panel van. This is most likely - as was common Finnish Army practise at the time - a civilian vehicle pressed into military service. I did a bit of Googling and found out what this van looked like...

It's a very attractive light van and I don't think would be difficult to convert my LRDG truck into something like it. I will have to build up the 'panel van' back end onto the Chevy truck's rear chassis.

However, I also found an alternative version of the Chevy panel van which would be far easier to make a conversion of...

It's not as pretty as the factory made panel van but might be more appropriate for my intended use as a make-shift radio car for my Finns. (I actually quite like the improvised nature of the third-party conversion, though I won't be replicating the paint job!)

Historically, aside from the fact that Chevrolets - of various makes and sizes - were very popular pre-war imports into Finland, I can't be sure whether they were in fact used as radio cars by the Finns. The ad-hoc nature of Finland's impressing civilian vehicles into it's army means that perhaps no-one really knows for sure what strange and unusual models were press-ganged into use.

I have trawled through the SA-Kuva photo archive and radio cars hardly feature at all - perhaps one or two civilian sedans, but only one specialist vehicle (a German military van purchased by the Finns). So I am going to use some 'artistic licence'.

Next: Rebuilding the Chevy's cab and working out how to make the van back-end.