Motto's Chev

[motto (RIP)]

An amusing detail about the fake LVT that was related to me had to do with the engine installation of the vehicle that was used as a pattern.
This vehicle had had the original powerplant, a Continenal 7 cylinder radial, replaced with an in-line diesel the radiator of which protruded some distance into the cargo compartment. A cowl and grill had been constructed or adapted to finish off the very non-original installation.
All of this had been faithfully copied for the fake.
David

[motto (RIP)]

Hmm, steel tracks on the tank but the spare track on the side of the hull is rubber!
Take a closer look. It's fake anyway.
The props people were very good at making what they didn't have.
David

[jim sewell]

Hi Dave
Keep them coming , very interesting.
Regards
Jim S.

[motto (RIP)]

Thanks Jim, there are not that many more of these to go and I would have got through them a lot quicker if I knew how to reduce them.
This picture shows a line up of the five regularly used GMCs and was taken at Victoria Park, the old Collingwood football ground that stood in for the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The MCG is where the Marines were actually accommodated after their return from Guadalcanal but it has been greatly changed since then.
One of the scenes shot this day was of the trucks loaded with marines arriving at the grounds. During the first 'take' I was driving the middle truck and we drove in under the stands. My front seat passenger accidently bumped the mal adjusted High/Low range lever into neutral and I rolled to a stop right in front of the camera and ruined the run. To make matters worse the engine was fumey and while non plussed as to what had happened I shut it down because of the hoard of people surrounding us and closing in ready to push the truck. I suddenly realised what the problem was and went to restart the truck but it didn't want to play any more. The battery was on it's last when the engine hesitantly came back to life. Having two hundred plus people watching and waiting for your every move is not a pleasant experience.
David

[Snowy]

Slightly off-topic but addresses your comment about the tediousness of reducing photos for posting.

This is a drop-dead-easy way of resizing, including doing in bulk with a single commandline command, no fancy or expensive Photoshop program needed:

Firstly, download the free/open source ImageMagick program from
http://www.imagemagick.org
and install. There are builds for Windows, Mac, Linux etc.

Once installed, open up a command prompt and go to your fullsize photos directory. (Best to practise on some test photos first)

Assuming you had a bunch of JPEG images you want to make a quarter the size of the originals, type the following:

convert -resize 25% *.jpg resized%03d.jpg

You should have a bunch of pics named resized000.jpg, resized001.jpg and so on. The %03 means substitute a padded 3-digit number for each image (This is an easy way to make thumbnails from originals.)

There are about fifty-seven million things you can do with this wonderful program - it's like a 100-bladed Swiss army knife for image manipulation, just take a look at the examples on the ImageMagick site.

Steve.

[motto (RIP)]

Thanks Snowy, I will certainly give it a go. Perhaps some level of competency is on the horizon but I'll keep working on the catapult idea just in case.
Photo:- Your worthy correspondent on location in North Melbourne with one of the GMCs.
Vehicles used in the filming were a mixture of purchased and hired vehicles a lot of which belonged to private owners. A GMC owner could expect to get $875 a day, a motorcycle owner $500. This would only apply if the vehicle was on set.
The clothing worn on set was of course fully supplied and once fitted was racked for use on later occasions by the same person. It was strange to have this outfit referred to by the wardrobe people not as a uniform but a 'costume'. Dammit! I'm a soldier, not a bloody fairy!
David

[Keith Webb]

David how accurate (or otherwise) was that dark green colour we see on US vehicles in the series?