How to be an Armoured Farmer, building Hobart's Funnies in Glorious 15mm (and maybe 28mm if they arrive in time!)
AVRE Bulls-horn Mine Plough Build
So, although not part of 77 Asslt Sqn RE that landed on D Day (there was one but it was on the ill fated LCT that got badly damaged) I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could scratch build a Jefferies Bulls-horn mine plough for one of my AVRE’s. The main problem with this is the lack of reference material on this piece of kit. I found a couple of photos, a plan that was drawn up by another modelling enthusiast and photos of a 1/35th model, and a Battlefront stafffer’s model. The weird thing is that the current AVRE’s (TITAN & TROJAN) have the capability of being fitted with a modern version of the same plough. It is now made by Pearson and is a full width version of the D Day one.
I noticed that there seamed to be two versions of the same plough and from what I could make out one of the modellers may have misinterpreted the photos. The plan version also had some peculiarities to the photos of D Day AVREs.
Therefore I decided that I would follow the overall dimensions but do my own interpretation. First off I drew up a sketch plan, worked out some of the dimensions and angles from the plan and then scaled it down to 15mm by taking the known measurement from one of the 15mm tanks and then compare that with the dimension on the plan so I could work out the ratio reduction. I then drew up a scaled mock up that I could then cut and fit the parts to prior to gluing together.
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