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Building the Otter

History

The Otter Light Reconnaissance Car came from the Canadian Military Pattern family, designed for a need for an armoured reconnaissance vehicle of this size. Developed by General Motors Canada, it was built on the CMP frame with the body supplied by the Hamilton Bridge Company. The vehicle had armour up to 12mm thick and was armed with a Boys Anti-Tank Rifle and a Bren Light Machine Gun. The Otter engine was more powerful than the Humber, but due to is extra weight, almost 1-ton heavier, it’s performance was not the greatest, and it was not exceptionally liked by its crews.

Build in Oshawa, Ontario, some 1700 vehicles were built between 1942 and 1945. The vehicle served in North West Europe and Italy, with mostly Canadian units, but was used by the British and some Commonwealth countries

Model

Mirror Models having started producing models based on the CMP frames, thus the Otter was a natural course for this frame. This model is an excellent plastic kit of this vehicle, and contains a few bits of resin and PE (see my review of the vehicle here). It should be noted that my build of this vehicle does use the extra detailing set available from LZ Models

Build

The build starts with the frame, having built a few of these already, it goes pretty quickly. The frame builds up great, with no fit issues, and is well detailed. A few things I do to make the task a little easier are I attached the suspension to the frame before molding and fitting the frame-suspension mounting plates, and for the axle mounting I cut the wire a little longer and glue one side. Once this is dry I will bend, cut, and glue the other side.

For locating the drive components, I find it best to mount the engine first, and watch the location indicated in the instructions. Once the engine is secured in place, the rest of the drive train goes together pretty easily , with a little trimming of the drive shafts once in place.

Set aside the frame, I next went to work on the body, again this goes together very well, with the exception I found the locator pins on the front of the firewall did not match up with those on the body sides, I just trimmed these off and aligned with the front armour slope. I did apply a little putty to clean up the joint.

Mounting the rear deck parts went very well as well, and these require a little extra work to obtain the weld seam. To do this, once the parts were attached and dried, I apply a liberal amount of liquid cement along the edge and repeatly, and carefully, scored the edge to achieve the weld seam.