Amusing Hobby ARL 44 1.35

Short Feature Article with Dai Williams

Just before we get going. here’s a quick look at how it all turned out…
Amusing Hobby ARL 44 1.35

And a little bit about the ARL 44…

(Photo: ARL-44 at the 501st-503rd Tank Regiment, Mourmelon-le-Grand. Courtesy The Shadock)

The ARL 44 was a French heavy tank designed in secrecy during the last years of the Second World War. The design progressed in the guise of a ‘heavy tractor’ designed for civilian use. Development began after the war with 60 vehicles eventually being built. The ARL 44 proved to be underpowered and unreliable. Its suspension consisted of small road wheels and tracks similar to the much earlier Char B tanks. This limited the vehicle’s speed. The vehicles saw no operational service and were eventually replaced by the American M47 which was a far better and more readily available weapon. A few examples remain today in various states of repair, but most were eventually scrapped.

(Photo: ARL 44 tank in Saumur tank museum. Courtesy MWAK)

The Build

The Amusing Hobby kit is in tan coloured plastic and includes individual track links and an aluminium gun barrel. There are large ventilation grilles on the rear of the vehicle which I assume covered fans used to cool the engine. To avoid being able to see into the empty interior of the model I backed these openings with plastic sheet that had been painted matt black. The open areas and grills were also painted in black before the etched covers were added.

The single link tracks are very easy to assemble. A little clean-up of each link was required, but less than would have been required had they come attached to sprues. The joints between the tracks are not very strong and so I glued them permanently to the model before it was painted. Any inaccessible areas were airbrushed in black before the tracks were added.

The vehicle has a rather odd-looking exhaust system, and I added some thin sections of plastic rod to the exhaust assembly rather than using the kit parts provided purely because these did not need to have seam lines removed.

I felt that the instructions left a little to be desired as they show the periscopes at the front of the hull (Part A34) mounted over what I assume are oil filler caps behind the driver rather than on the open locating points in front of the driver. It was also not that clear that the return rollers had to be fitted from the underside of the hull sponsons – a point that I missed until it was too late leaving me with a rather difficult assembly job.

Many of the photos of the ARL 44 that I have seen show a tarpaulin carried on a rack on the back of the turret. I made one of these from Milliput rolled into a thin sheet between two pieces of baking paper with liberal amounts of talcum powder used to stop everything sticking to everything else. The Milliput sheet was left for about an hour so that it had just begun to harden before it was cut into a rectangle and gently rolled up and pushed into place. Leaving the Milliput to harden slightly avoided the problem of getting fingerprints in it when I rolled it up, also thwarting any future police investigations into my activities.

The instructions show a multi-coloured camouflage scheme and an overall grey scheme both of which I think are fictitious. I believe that all the vehicles were actually painted in an overall green colour as shown on the box art. The model was primed with Alclad’s Black primer (after the metal gun barrel was primed with Halford’s car body primer). The model was then undercoated in Tamiya Black Green (XF-27) followed by a patchy overspray of Flat Olive Green (XF-58).

The weathering was limited to some shading and a representation of dust in recesses using pastel chalks. Some vehicles appear to have carried names painted onto the upper turret sides, but most seem to have had their markings limited to a small number plate so most of the kit’s transfers went unused.

All in all, this was an enjoyable build of an odd vehicle that looks to me like an uncomfortable mix of tanks from two different eras.
Dai W.