Jim, I'm also by no means an 'expert', at least not on US military equipment. Actually I have never seen any modern US military vehicle in the flesh! Well, OK - I have seen some Humvees from the distance on the highway , but that's about it :-)
But it took me several months to build my model of M923A1 truck and I tried to do my homework on this one. I collected a huge number of photos (over 400 photos from the web, plus four books - one dedicated to M939 trucks and three that include some photos of them), downloaded several TM's and asked a lot of questions - most of them answered by Sabot (Rob, thanks again! You're my hero! ). So I can say that I know a lot about those trucks. I know a lot technical details (jeezzz, with all the TMs I have, I could repair them myself now ) and know a lot about differences in various variants. Still this is all purely theoretical knowledge. If Pete says that his unit uses trucks that contain mixture of components from various work orders - it is a new information to me, but I have to believe him. I don't have any picture which would show such a mixed-variant truck, but all I can check are pictures - Pete has the real thing available for him and real life experience!

You mentioned the idea of the article - I think I may prepare something like that. I still have the M925 Italeri kit on the box pile, so I can easily take photos showing all the parts of the kit before and after I modified them.

Rgds,
Pawel

You hit the nail on the head Pawel.
I have drill this weekend and once again I have a digital camera at my disposal.
Along with the other kits I am going to put in the diorama, I will take their pictures and also take pictures of their real life conterparts. More reference photos for the gallery.
About 90% of modern armor reference pictures you see are of active duty units vehicles. It would be good to start a album of National Guard vehicles to see the deffiernce. I guess Ishould stock up on disks for the camera for this weekend.

You've akready shown a steady hand at modeling modern US gear in the past. I can't wait to see that dio finished !
Strange that a long truck bed is used for this though. It's a lot longer than the shelter is. What's the use of the extra length ? Or is it just coincidence the shelter was placed on a long bed truck ?

Jan - the early need for the extended bed cargo trucks were to handle missile containers. I got into them researching how the LaCrosse and Honest John field artillery rockets were handled in the field. Neither weapon actually were transported long distances mounted on the truck launchers - they were carried in containers and assembled in staging areas on the launcher trucks for the short distance travel to launch points.

The long beds carried the bodies of the rockets - and or the warhead sections. The long beds still serve today in carrying relatively light, but outsized components...

Howdy Pawel,

Many thx for your offer, it is both generous and genuine. Allow me to check on the accuracy of whether that fuel tank would work for me or not, and then I can let you know.
Again, thanks for the offer sir!

Tread.

Jeffry(96D4H59),
Are you talking about a regular looking "Expando Van"? If so, Real Models does one of those too. I will post pictures of it later.

Jan(The General),
The long bed is what our section is authorized. We di have it on a short bed 5 Ton, but we turned that truck in. I think it fits better on the long bed because of our type of air conditioning unit on the back (the long rectangular boc on the back). GUNTRUCK is also correct about the 5 Ton.
I took pictures of the real thing this weekend and I will post them later on today.