Fake Tanks: Models at The Tank Museum

those of you who know the tank museum know we have a fantastic collection of armoured vehicles over 300 of them but you might not know so much about the rest of the collection one of which is our model collection now this particular model here is an example to show how leonardo's original design for a tank would have worked and what it might have looked like now within the collection we've also got toys we've got recognition models we've got concept models of things that might have been developed and we've even got huge one-to-one scale models so let's have a look around the museum and see some of that collection some years ago the production company that was working with steven spielberg on his war horse movie came to the tank museum to measure our original mark iv tank they built a replica to use in the movie now at the end of the film that model or that replica was offered to the tank museum and we bought it because we knew with the first world war anniversaries coming up we were going to be asked to demonstrate what a first world war tank looked like and we had already made the decision that our own first world war tanks even though we could run a couple of them actually they were now getting so old so vulnerable we didn't want to do any damage to them so that worked very well for us and in our war horse display here we were going to put that running replica on the stand behind me but we found it was so useful for demonstrations parades all sorts of things that we ended up building yet another one-to-one scale replica of a first world war mark iv tank so models can help explain a story in a museum we can have models like this where they can demonstrate things we could never do with the original item and with a working one-to-one model people can get that impression of what a first world war tank would have looked like when it had been moving around the battlefield this model is a just stunning example of an engineering model we have in the collection this is in our first world war hall made way back by kelso and company up in glasgow just after the first world war you can actually compare it with the real thing that's behind me now this is one of those engineering models put together commissioned as it were by the north british locomotive company that were actually making these mark eight tanks uh in 1918 1919 it's a tank of course that was going to be a joint production between britain france and america a number are assembled but only after the end of the war they never see any action now the north british locomotive company in glasgow went along to kelso and company they were model makers shipbuilding model makers as well so they did those lovely big ships models and they put together this fantastic engineering model and we find this not just a lovely model but it's also important as well because we think the paint on this must have been supplied by the factory so for us it's one of those models that give helps us get a match to what the first world war tanks might have been painted like the colour scheme that was actually being used so we did a match on this for some of our first world war vehicles and there's another lovely little feature about this particular model watch this so those tracks go round to give a little bit of mobility and also if you look at the end of the barrel a light comes on as if the gun's firing so what a lovely wonderful thing superb model and still kind of gives you that thrill like when you were a kid coming around here and you looked in cases like this you know this one still sort of takes your breath away one other area of model making that sometimes we can overlook is the idea of the presentation piece the gift so think of the officer's mess table where you've got the silver armored car or something rather grand that's done to commemorate something or was a parting gift etc that sort of thing and we're very fortunate here we've got this amazing what we call the gold tank for obvious reasons um this fantastic bit of the craftsman the model maker but almost like the jewelers art as well this was put together take you back a bit this was put together as a gift to the shah of iran in the 1970s and if you've seen our tank chats on challenger one etc what happens is the shah comes to britain to order what becomes a series of tanks the ultimate one being the sheer which is going to be the the sort of um top end having trouble armor having the uh 120 gun etc all sorts of things going on that way um now that the shah put a lot of money into the development of that tank including infrastructure at church each auburn the tank factory site as we sometimes call it and uh vicars were going to be building these tanks now that program had got quite far forward when the shah was deposed and the order was cancelled by the new revolutionary government in iran and that meant this gift that had been purchased or put together and commissioned by vickers was now redundant and that's why it was then gifted to the tank museum and uh not so long ago i actually met the chap who had to come down here and just make sure the security was up to it if it was coming here um so it's one of those another one of those sort of model pieces um that combines a number of skills but it's a beautiful engineering model but it's also gold-plated and also with it that amazing little bit of history that still continues because there's massive arguments still going on in the courts as i'm speaking now um about paying the money back that the iranians had actually already or the iranian government had paid for that tank program one of the most important models we actually have in our collection is this one it's one of a pair that was originally done in the first world war as an experiment to see how camouflage schemes would look on that rhomboid shaped tank now the other the missing model which sadly was destroyed in the 1960s it basically fell apart according to the records was painted by solomon j solomon at the royal academician and he's the person that not only did he paint the model but he actually went to thetford and painted a whole first world war tank that was then copied by the troops they put their own vehicle next to it and they coppered it over but at the time when they were doing the research experimentation they also got another artist called percy cudahart and if you read his biography he gets very frustrated in dealing with the military but one of his paint schemes is on this model which is this sort of broken up very modernistic looking zigzag scheme now that was actually used on sniper suits it was experimented on a ship as well but persecutor heart he does not get on with the army they have a number of falling outs and this scheme as far as we're aware never gets operationally used on a tank even though there's some interesting photographs again with camouflage being used including this sort of broken up zig-zaggy on on an experimental model now the model huge why it's so important to us is it's one of those few things again that survived from the first world war um that that was really there at the beginning when they're trying out these experiments so for us very important wonderful that this one survives it's actually made of wood underneath that paint scheme and canvas and it's been repaired i think a number of times over its history but still having this wonderful patterning left for us to be able to see it's quite something one of the other types of categories and models we have here in the collection are concept models or the idea that you put a model together to show to demonstrate a potential idea and some are things that we can see have led to actual vehicles or being used on vehicles other ones sometimes they're just looking at technologies how it might work what might be the way of going in the future that don't actually necessarily lead to a definite vehicle that we can all recognize and we've got quite a number of these these models came from chertsey the old tank factory and the other day i was in here having a look at some of these ones and notice the fact that these say keys held by richard rawlins and there's concept a concept b and down the bottom we've got another one there part of the same series concept c now i emailed richard and again he came back to me um pointing out what these were being done for and if we look at this one this is concept model b this particular model i slide it out i can put the gun barrel which is separate there we go just on the end here um so you can see that and you can see this is basically with an external gun they call it here again uh they were gonna have a three-man crew 120 gun compact power pack and they call it a chaser auto loading system was going to be put on that one as a way of trying to uh lessen the number of crew members and again this concept of a unmanned turret or having an external sort of gunnery system you can see has been done a number of times i'm always fascinated by these because so often with the concepts especially when a new vehicle is envisaged everyone seems to always go off to have that let's look at where we are with the technology let's look at where we are at this particular moment in time in sense of what's out there so often what comes back and what boils it down to is still quite often a traditionally shaped tank type product comes out at the end with a manned turret and a fairly sizable hull as well but again interesting to see how these and again richard was telling me that on the chertsey site there was a model maker shop because again some of this work of course at the time was secret um and they would do wood as in this particular example is what they call a wood block model other ones are in metal and we've got other examples here so they would be silvered and they'd be used to test for radar signature so again other ideas for using these models before you actually get to the stage of building a real one or where sometimes having the model the model can be used for testing that you don't need a whole real vehicle there so again another one of those wonderful pieces that we've got in the collection now i'm going to safely take that off so we don't lose it and put it back in there and you can see every one of these boxes has got some wonderful story like that in it this beautiful model is another example that we hold in the collection this is a scratch built aluminium it's metal it's an engineering model in many ways but it's also radio control it's motorized and it was made um just by one chap you know a guy called dennis downey he had his he initially was interested in making boats he made model boats in his spare time etc then did a visit to the tank museum in the 1990s and decided he was going to build this tank and you can see this is our pre-production king tiger with as we always go on about the erroneously called porsche turret quite often on the front there um now this model he made in his uh his workshop he used to he took about three and a half years he spent about three hours a day it is fantastic when you look at the detailing and again that sense of why do people do all these things i mean you know this is done to such a quality level every nut and bolt on the wheels is a real nut and bolt the suspension here seems to work it goes up and down every link is machined and milled every link is individual about 90 links on each side for those tracks there the turret turns you can actually do that from the radio control system is actually turning the turret and you can actually even get this gun recoils as well um goes back into the turret so all these beautiful detailing of things that work and um you know standard nice story at the same time when dennis was sadly he was dying he was dead keen that this model came to the tang museum so we were able to accept it here ending up with a product like this which you've just got to say is just an awe-inspiring piece of work one area where we probably are familiar that models are used by the military is in recognition the idea that trying to train people to identify what the kit is now we quite often think of that as being like you know what the enemy vehicle so we can identify what model it is what mark etc but actually of course you need to identify your own vehicles as well especially if you're fighting in an allied force so you don't have blue on blue situations occurring so that idea of how are we going to we think about it with aircraft recognition in america in the second world war they actually got school kids to try and build literally tens of thousands of model kits that were going to be issued out to all the soldiers so that they the idea was you made the kit at home painted it black and you'd be able to hold it up at different angles and so people would be able to identify an aeroplane because of course you don't always see it square on or in the way that you think you should now we of course have got lots of armored vehicle models and it was only when i was looking on the shelves you realize literally we're in the hundreds of different types that were different companies different manufacturers come up at different times and i just pulled out a selection here and you can see we've got them all nicely wrapped but i've unwrapped one there this is a second world war recognition model it's made in metal and it's um those of you there stag hand armored car holocast and again different companies some of the companies you can recognize this one here the box actually says rowley workshops addison bridge place kensington and this was done fairly early in the war beautifully wrapped up in fact i can't even get it out actually because the ties go underneath but in there you can see a german armored car is actually right in the bottom there of the box and another example that i can open for you here's again these are in their original wartime boxes here this is a a wonderful model there again the ties there but there you can see if i do it very carefully there's a panther that was used as a recognition model um for training british forces in the second world war and again panzerkamp fargum five panther is written on the bottom in a label so these were done as i mentioned by a number of different companies um and they carried on being made of course after the war and into the cold war period and we've got models here by some of the companies names are quite well known denzel skinner he served in armor in world war ii went on to set up his own little model making business at one point he had i think he had this lovely factory behind the back of a pub and it was he got 30 people employed and they were making these beautiful different sorts of models for the military mainly but he also did some of the motorized models for film work and again as i say this this this problem doesn't go away it's still being done today this is from the cold war and i mentioned this one because listen to this afe model says it's written on it warning these models are expensive and must be handled with care um i hate to tell you that wasn't the case because a number of these in here are actually broken but this was again the typical sort of thing that was being done in the cold war in this box there we've got a collection of soviet tea tanks you just need to make sure you also know your own stuff again it's not just knowing your enemy it's also being able to recognize and again you can imagine these being laid out not just for a testing but also some of these were actually done out onto a sheet of war games and you were given you were given almost like miniature ranges where again you could look at things at different distances um and bits of them could be hidden so you still were expected to be able to identify that particular item so again another reason we have a large number of a certain type of model in the collection quite often they're fairly basic they're trying to give you an indication of the shape of something but it's still something that the military actually has today and they still use and we're actually encouraging you know one of the things we're saying to soldiers is if you make a plastic model of perhaps a potential threat vehicle you tend to remember the details about that model um you know what the bin shape was like what the wheels are the spacings etc and that may help you in the future when you're on the battlefield or doing an exercise to identify so model making you know is kind of like some of the army units actually have model making groups and it's something we'd be encouraging as well because of course they can buy the models from our shop but it's it's not just that it's just this idea as well that that's a really good way of learning a lot about a vehicle if you make a model of it one of the other areas that we do have some models but not that many is probably what you make the people watching this plastic model kits and the reasoning behind that you know this is a plastic model kit here king tiger um early pre-production one with all the zimmerit on the side in the diorama but we don't have many of these and the reason uh many moons ago when i first got here we had boxes and boxes in our then store that were set of wooden huts and some of those boxes when i got to them and opened them couldn't work out what was going on because in there literally some of them was a sticky goo across the bottom of the box and it turned out that when we investigated further these were some of the earlier plastic model kits that whether it was the storage conditions whether it was just those long chain polymers that make up the plastic kits had started coming apart and degrading basically they collapsed and we got different models at different stages some of which you could actually see the physical model still was recognizable but it was starting to almost bend and go in on itself some had got to the point where they just completely broken down and you just had this sticky goo and of course that was another problem as well because if they decided to get out that box and run onto something else below it so we made a policy decision at the museum that we weren't going to continue or going to accept really any plastic model kits and we now we have our own little model makers group that regularly comes along and demonstrates here at the museum if we need a model to fill in a gap you know to explain something here's a missing variant here's how it might have been used etc we can commission them to make a plastic model or in some cases so for example for interactives etc we go out to a company to build some of those ones but we are not a collection of plastic model kits we only need those where it's to illustrate a point now of course many of you who are model makers the weird thing is is probably the model you're making or in certain examples has probably been copied from one of the tanks that's here at the tank museum because over the years whether it's been airfix tamir etc many of the model making companies have come here nowadays some of them are doing laser scanning and of course you've got things like kobe who've been working with so you've got brick-built models now as well as they're a much more traditional plastic model kit if you've enjoyed this do look out for our other videos on models and modelling and of course if you fancy making your own model have a look at our online shop please do subscribe to the tank museum's youtube channel and if you can support us please do so on patreon

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 121,375

Rating: 4.978622 out of 5

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, the tank museum tank chats, modelling, model making, model tanks, recognition models, replica tank, ww1 tank, ww2 tank, tamiya, airfix, model kits, hobby, king tiger, tiger tank, model ww1 tank, war horse, steven spielberg, concept model, collection, panzers

Id: yt-tqsdXZPw

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021