1:35 Faun L900 road wheels set (weighted) type 1

The tractor that hauled damaged tanks away

The Faun L900 from the works in Nuremberg was among the heaviest German trucks of its day. The nine-ton machine with an air-cooled diesel engine had one main task: to get a lowboy semi-trailer under its hook and haul a damaged or captured tank on it from the battlefield to a workshop. It therefore ran slowly but with brutal pull, and its tall cab with a short front end is unmistakable. Vehicles of this type were the backbone of the German recovery service and they appear in photographs across the whole of Europe.

A load you can see

On a vehicle whose point is to pull tens of tons, a perfectly round tire looks especially out of place. The castings therefore carry a bowing where they bed down, a bulged sidewall and a slightly spread contact area. The difference shows above all when the model stands in a diorama beside a lowboy semi-trailer: the eye reads at once that the machine is carrying something.

The type 1 rendering

The brand offers three variants for this vehicle differing in the design, and this is the first of them. The rim of the spare wheel is a separate item, so a spare can be added as well.

The last steps

Cut the casting blocks off with a saw, sand the surface and degrease it before painting. When seating them, take care that the flattened parts point straight down.

In a diorama such a vehicle seldom stands alone. Beside it belongs a lowboy semi-trailer with loading ramps, a winch cable led under the bed and best of all a machine it is just hauling away. The weighted wheels hold the whole composition together, because without them the heaviest element of the scene would come across as the lightest of all. The radiator grill with its cover, which the brand lists separately, can be added too.