Thanks, Guys..! Not many other pics available as I simply did not take many during construction... I built this model for a Belgian friend, who provided me with a lot of info about the vehicle, including technical manual, and many pictures of the vehicle in the Belgian army, and in Belgian museum. To be totally honest, he wanted a 1/35 kit, but while starting on the 1/35 model, I thought I might as well built a 1/72 model too. Both are destined to become part of my resin kit range, and as such, the 1/72 model seen in the above picture was almost ready for casting. Work on the 1/35 pattern continues... Another Belgian modeller provided me with yet more pictures of hulls rotting away somewhere in Belgium.
I learned quite a lot about this vehicle while going through my references, and both kits will be typical of the M-75s used in the Belgian army as APCs. I discovered many small differences from one vehicle to the other almost, certainly more than would be explained by the two main 'batches' of M75s built, most readily told apart by the shape of the fuelling cap at the rear of the vehicle, right between the two main access doors. I worked from two sets of drawings, both published in the IPMS Belgium magazine, Kit, but with the help of all those pictures I also had, as both sets of drawings, though helpful, have their shortcomings..
Obviously, the Belgian army (who used the vehicle for almost 30 years) was responsible for some of those 'variations', even from one APC to the other, without even talking about the later more specialised variants created by the technicians of the Belgian army.
Amongst those differences are the type of 'steps' used to board the vehicle, the layout of the grilles at the top of the glacis and on the side of the vehicles, shape of the engine access door on the right side of the hull, the type of towing eyes,... The more specialised Belgian variants bringing different stowage bins, plus specialised equipment and tools.
Both patterns are built from fairly thin plastic card sheeting, thickened from the inside with chunkier bits of plastic, superglue and milliput epoxy putty. Most of the assembly is done with superglue to speed the process of gap filling and sanding down... (I'm not very patient!) The welding pattern seen all over the 1/72 pattern is done with thin plastic rods smoothered in liquid glue and then 'squashed' with a blade to create some pattern. The 1/72 pattern used the modified cuppola, tracks and wheels of a 1/72 M24 (a pre-painted metal model with some plastic parts), while the 1/35 is being built with a number of similar items taken from the Italeri M24 and AFV Club M41. Milliput was also used to sculpt the driver's 'cuppola'.