Hanomag 251 Half-tracks: 251/21 "Drilling" triple AA cannon variant
This is a latish variant, which mounted old aircraft cannons, which I had thought had been removed from up-gunned fighter-planes, but now I'm told were newly made guns of the same type - they kept the old style gun in production for the new use. Some of these vehicles used 15mm cannon, and others used 20mm. The difference in the look of the gun at this scale is minimal. They were used against ground targets too, with great effect, although they could not depress below the horizontal.
This is another C chassis version, as can be seen from the altered nose. The hull is raised slightly, by two vertical plates on the sides, and one sloping one at the front, which is slightly wider than the roof. The silvery mass you can see is some SHQ German infantry stowage items (helmets, gas mask canisters etc.), glued on. The metal box at the rear of the vehicle is there for no particular reason other than that I had the spare part. The guns can't depress that low to shoot it off anyway, so they may have used this space for stowage.
Picture showing internal detail. The front benches are removed, and the rear left bench is covered with ammo boxes. These have been completely remodelled since this photograph was taken, and now I have three much larger ammo boxes bound together by a simple strip, and standing on the floor. These are upright, all the same height, but one a bit wider than the others (for the central gun, which was harder to re-load), with square black holes in their tops, where the belts came out. I'm afraid I have no picture of these. The pedestal on which the gun rotates was made from the end of an old plastic pen. It is round cross-section, tapering at the top, and flared out a bit at the bottom.
Close up of the turret top, showing the triple guns. The guns are made entirely from plastic card and rod. The ends of the barrels are cut at an angle, sloping down and in, and the gun bodies are a sandwich of thin card outside thick. The gunner's head rests on a large pad, in front of which you can see the gun sight. The pad is attached to a upward-bent bar which connects to the two side shields. The shield has little strengthening parts in the front lower corners - little triangular pieces which look like the front bottom corners of a Panzer II, III, or IV. The front part also has a little cut-out for the gun sight. From the horrendous state of my fingernails, you can tell how much hard labour I've been doing lately. My fingers are bending the sides of the turret in slightly - they were not quite parallel.
The underside of the turret. Under the centre part of the turret is a funnel-like piece (grey/green) which caught the falling shell casings, and guided them into the pedestal (after which they fell out the bottom of the vehicle?). Mounted on the top of this is the pivot which allows the gun to be raised and lowered. This was done by "body English", that is, without any gears or levers, but simply by the operator's leaning back or pushing on little stirrups fixed to the bottom of the pedestal. My crewman does not flex, however, so I omitted the stirrups. The hinge I made by threading a piece of thin rod through holes burned through with a hot pin.
The ammunition boxes resemble the boxes pictured in one source I had, while another suggested that the boxes were a great deal larger. The larger ones seemed to match the huge number of shells this was supposed to have when fully loaded, but seemed way too big to fit in the vehicle and allow traverse. The crewman is a Fujimi 251 passenger, with his legs cut off and glued back on wide apart.
This picture does not show as well as I'd hoped the cradle for the guns, nor the seat on which the man sits. You can just about make out the small white seat, like a big wide bicycle seat, glued to the backside of the gunner, and from this, a thin rod connects the seat to the cradle. The seat hangs on that rod suspended from the cradle. The thick piece of rod at the bottom you can see is the rod which slots onto the pedestal so that the model can rotate as well as elevate.
The finished vehicle. Standing behind the gun is an SHQ officer with binoculars, with the pink piping of the panzergrenadier on his hat. In the background is a Dapol (once made by Airfix) windmill. The large ammunition boxes would have been suspended on hinges, so that they hung straight down at all times. This was impossible to model for a wargaming vehicle at this scale, so I didn't bother.
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