I would like to see if I can help clear up some tire details about the Italeri modern 5 ton trucks that are on the market. The kits need a lot of work to make them accurate. That’s why there are so many after market detail set available. The military unit I am in has about 2 dozen of these trucks. We received them directly from the factory (AM General) and therefore they were not modified before we got them. I have see many pictures of these truck in the field and it looks like deployed units use whatever they have on hand when replacement are needed. This tends to make vehicles misidentified when these pictures are used for reference purposes.

The M925 truck comes from the factory with Military Tread 1100 x 20 tires. Singles on the front, duels on the back. The Italeri kit tires are a little small and the rims are the wrong style. I have never seen a rim design that looks like the one in the kit. Good replacement wheels and tires would be the ones in the AFV Long Tom kit. This stile of tire and rim has been used for at least the past 60 years. I don’t know how Italeri got it wrong. But then they left all the air break cans, brake drums, shocks and steering linkage off too, and most model commercial trucks manage to have them.

The M923A1 trucks comes with Goodyear radial 1400 x 20 tires. This is not the tread pattern on the box art of the kit. No example of this tire is available that I know of. The kit tires do not match any known tire pattern. This is probably because in the injection process the plastic tire would not release form the mold if they did it correctly. If they used vinyl tires like Revel Germany uses then they could do it. This problem is not only with the M923. Their Hummer and Oshkosh tanker and cargo trucks have the same problems.

The M923A2 trucks come with the Michelin radial 1400 x 20 tires. This is the tire pictured on the box art. It is available from many after market manufactures. All the ones I’ve seen have the distinctive bulges in the sidewalls. This is not a tire defect. The tires are designed to run with various amounts of air in them, from full pressure for on hard surface, (highway ) to flat (for use in soft sand). These trucks have an auto tire inflation system built into them and controlled in the cab by the driver. The control unit is mounted on the shift consol and has pus buttons like the ones used for the automatic transmission. By the way, all 923’s and 925,s have 6 cylinder Cummins engines with automatics. Italeri kits have clutch peddles and shift levers. These need to be removed when building the kits. You can tell if the truck has the auto inflation system because there are plates mounted on the outside of the front rims covering the air lines and the rear wheels have a square cover mounted on the hub with a small air line coming out going to the rim.

The new FMTV 2.5 ton and 5 ton (these are the trucks you see with the flat nose and big windshields) all have Caterpillar electronic fuel injected diesels with automatics. These trucks built by Stewart Stevenson have completely different tread patterns. I have seen pictures of 923’s with these tires on them. But like I said, in the field (or war zone) you use what you have. I don’t know if this helps clear anything up or not, but I thought I’d give it a try.