Greetings all. I thought I'd share a few photos of my all paper, self designed, Holt 1-man tank realized in @ 1/24 scale. There isn't too much information out there about this little parade tank - a Youtube video, a few black and white photos, and a wikipedia article. From what I've gleaned, it was used primarily as a Red Cross fund raising gimic during the war years. It was built almost entirely of wood (including the tracks), and was powered by a motorcycle engine. The "guns" were simple mock ups, made from pipe or possibly heavy cardboard tubes. It appears to have had at least two different liveries during it's life. One with the name Holt (Benjamin Holt) and the logo for the future Caterpillar Corporation prominently displayed. The other with US ARMY and the designation H.A. 36 painted on the gun sponsons. There were wild rumors spurred by a Popular Mechanics magazine cover that the H.A. 36 was a new weapon that was going to be built in mass numbers and deployed to Europe.
I'm not sure of its exact dimensions, but comparing it with the people in the photos and video, I estimated that it was somewhere around 4 feet high, and about 6 feet long. It could be a little larger than that (people were smaller then). I used Photoshop to draw and color the parts. I managed to fit all the parts onto one piece of letter sized paper. For the guns, paper Q-tip shafts were sanded to shape with an emery board, and then covered with matching colored printer paper. All the little circular greebles around the track sides were laminated to .3mm cardboard and were cut out with a leather punch.
I was originally going to display it on a brick road section with a streetlight for a scale reference, but I got lazy and bored at the end and resorted to simple groundwork on a redwood textured paper base.
“[B]ut these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping..." -Erich Maria Remarque
I was going to ask what dimensions you have, but I see it's in the text.
My own view is that the Holt is actually bigger than that: I came across a side view of it somewhere online, with two men (one civvy and an officer) standing nearby. From the proportions of the men, I was able to estimate a length of 9ft and height of 4.5ft.
You could be right about the dimensions. It was just a stab in the dark on my part from what little photo evidence I had. One of the beauties of modelling in card, is that I can adjust the scale at printing to yield whatever size I want. If I ever do stumble across the true dimensions of the vehicle, I can just print out an adjusted page and rebuld it. All it will cost me besides time and a little Elmer's glue is a piece of cardstock and some ink.
Thank you Tim and Kamil. The model is a one off at this time. If there's interest, I could see about hosting it here. I already have one paper model in the download section.
