Great history Jakko and also a nice looking kit, looking forward to watching this
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It turns out to be not as simple as that … Somebody supplied me with scans of original construction drawings for the LCA, and consulting those, they say the door was to be 30 inches by 18 inches, or 21.8 mm × 13.1 mm in 1:35 — which is what Gecko gives you. Those same drawings say the wall was made of “doubleskin double diagonal plank mahogany” which fits with how it’s moulded. However:
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That doesn’t look like a diagonally planked wall to me, and the door is clearly larger than the kit’s — that’s what got me measuring in the first place. I think this represents a later evolution of the LCA than the drawings (and the kit).
For those interested, here are the drawings of the LCA (4.5 MB zip). I can’t attach zip files or PDFs to messages on this forum, and it would resize the image files to be so small as to be useless, so I had to post it somewhere else. I also threw in what I think is an original, official drawing of the camouflage pattern.Comment
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Superb bit of Historical background there Jakko,a really great read.....those photos are real gems :thumb2:.
Interesting to see the locals prepared to help carry the injured,nice touch that
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I think it’s a wounded civilian, and one of the men carrying the stretcher looks like he has a fireman’s helmet on, with that neck flap, so I guess he at least was in the fire brigade. None of them are wearing OD or BS¹ armbands, though, so they’re probably not resistance fighters. First aid courses and training continued through the war, I know that, probably exactly for things like this. It surprised me a bit more to find one or two other photos like this, of civilians on LCAs, to be carried to the other side,² but that’s what I intend to do with this model: a few British crew and a number of civilians going aboard to be evacuated.
¹ OD = Orde Dienst (“Order Service”, as in a service to keep order after the liberation would come), one of the largest resistance organisations; BS = Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (“Internal Armed Forces”), the umbrella organisation set up by the Dutch government to coordinate all resistance organisations.
² Some local colour: to us on the north bank of the Western Scheldt, “the other side” is implicitly understood by everyone to mean Zeelandic Flanders; to everyone from there, though, we’re “the other side” — confusion ensues when talking to someone from the opposite bank :smiling3:
The model itself is proving more problematic than I expected, though :sad: I haven’t used a single drop of glue on this model yet, and I’m already correcting mistakes. A simple thing Gecko got wrong is the rear deck: this has diagonal lines moulded on to represent diagonal planking, but the construction drawings clearly say the decks were “double skin mahogany” without mentioning diagonal planking, so I think it means plywood. In photos, I’ve not seen any sign of diagonal planking on the rear deck, and in any case, the engine room has an armoured steel deck — only the part aft of that was wood. So, I removed the lines with sandpaper and a curved knife blade:
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This is the part that is easy to fix. The next bit is a little harder … Here is part of the construction drawings, of the front of the craft:
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Now compare the floor as drawn in this to Gecko’s:
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On the real craft, the floor sloped down slightly from the bow ramp to frame No. 3, then more steeply to meet the main floor at frame 6. The kit part, though, has it slope down to between frames 1 and 2, then turn horizontal to just behind frame 3, and slope to halfway between frames 6 and 7. Clearly, this is not per the drawing. The few photos I have that show this area, seem to agree more with the drawing than with the kit part, like this one:
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Yes, the boards are curved a little, but they don’t have the clear kinks that the Gecko part does.
And noticing that caused me to notice something even more significant, best illustrated by assembling the main parts for the steering position with some Blu-Tack:
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They’re in the wrong place! In the drawings, the armour plates very clearly line up with frames 3 and 5, but here, the front plate is behind frame 3 and the rear one is even further behind frame 5 — meaning that the side armour plate is also too long :sad: Also, you can see in the photo of the real LCA above, the armour plate runs down to the main floor of the vessel and the steering position’s floor is inside the armour plate, whereas Gecko has the armour as standing on top of that floor rather than behind it. And, of course, that also means the deck just behind the position needs to be extended forward a little as well.
:disappointed:
I’m decidedly not pleased with this. For me, it’s too major a thing to want to leave as it is because it’s so noticeable once you know, but it will be such a lot of work to correct this that I don’t look forward to correcting it either …Comment
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Surely the flat part of the floor is correct ,looking at the photo the bottoms of the doors are flush with the flat floor? if the floor sloped upwards the outward opening doors would foulComment
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Jakko,
A really interesting introduction as always. I will follow along if I may.Comment
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Didn't the US Rangers use the same landing craft for Point du Hoc? The colored image with the blue crafts are lettered A,B,C as per the ones used for the operation.
Cheers,
WabbleComment
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There is that, yes. Maybe I’ve misjudged the angles in the photo, but regardless, a lot of things are in the wrong places, and I also don’t think the lower part of the ramp should be full-width because the drawing says it runs “between wing seats”.
If you insist
They did, yes. Gecko has a separate kit of an LCA with grappling hook launchers as was used by them.Comment
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OK, slightly more investigation, and once more, it looks like there may have been design changes:
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This is a section through the bow, and it clearly shows the bottom edge of the doors to be raised above the floor so they can clear the sloping forward floor. However, the photo of the real LCA shows the planks to go up to the bottom edge of the doors, so the floor there must run differently than in the drawing.Comment
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you're clearly having a lot of fun Jakko!Comment
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Jakko, I'd interpret "double skin mahogany” as meaning, not plywood, but two layers of planking, which would logically be diagonal, probably at 90 degrees between the layers. There might well have been a steel plate fitted over that, to protect the wood. Looking at the door and bulkhead in your earlier post, they certainly look to me like steel panels bolted or riveted onto a wooden structure.
PeteComment
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The thing is that for the hull, the drawings specifically say it’s a double skin of planks, and that they are to be put on diagonally. Whereas other sections just say “double skin mahogany” — if the diagonal bit was a given then they wouldn’t specify that, and I also don’t think they would specify it in one place but not another if both were meant to be like that …?
The bulkhead and door seem to be early and late varieties: early as planks with a small door, later as metal sheets (riveted to those planks perhaps?) with a larger door. But I don’t know enough to be able to say around when this change was made — or even if the hypothesis is actually correct
And yes, I am having a lot of fun, for a given definition of [ICODE]fun[/ICODE]
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Having specified once that the planks are to be diagonal. they wouldn't need to repeat that. Perhaps.
PeteComment
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What I mean is they say it everywhere the planks are known to be diagonal, like the sides, the stern, inside the passageway in the bow, etc. You can take a look at the drawings, maybe you will see something I’m missing
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In drawing 1, the text under "Planking" is... interesting. "Double skin mahogany, bottom planking two 3/8 skins inner diag'l
Outer diagonal side planking 1/4" side, inner diagonal outer fore & aft or diagonal if preferred."
So, I'm assuming that where double diagonal is not specified, the direction of one layer planking is up to the builder.
I'll have a look at the other drawings tomorrow, cat permitting.
PeteComment
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