How to be an Armoured Farmer, building Hobart's Funnies in Glorious 15mm (and maybe 28mm if they arrive in time!)

So there are a number of funnies that the array of model producers out there in shiny land don’t make. which means you either have to accept it, or go and convert something into what you need.

In my case I am trying to reproduce one of the gapping teams from 77 Asslt Sqn RE and to do that I need to create a Churchill AVRE variant known as the Log Carpet Layer. Now first off, this is not to be confused with the Fascine carrying variant, no this beast is something just as simple but definitely different.

Now this leads me on to one of the reasons I love my hobby, I get the chance to read lots of book and reference sources trying to hunt down what I am looking for and in turn discover some of the amazing (and sometimes very frank) stories of those involved in the fighting.

So after a little digging I came across a thread on a modelling site where someone was looking for the same information as me. They found the following sketch of what appeared to be the log carpet variant.

However, two things didn’t feel right, firstly there was no photographic evidence of this type of AVRE from either the run up to D Day, on the day, or shortly afterwards and that frame is not something you are going to easily miss.

After a bit more digging, it transpired (as do a lot of sketches of AVRE variants)  that this was a drawing board sketch and that it didn’t actually come into use until the very end of the war (and I still haven’t found any tangible evidence that it did). What I did find reference to was an Engineering design on a log carpet layer and thanks to the hard work of other modelling enthusiasts they had tracked down what would come to be the real deal.