Battle Kings K-116 Artillery Truck

Matchbox Battle Kings have been one of my favourite things since childhood, and I will admit that I enjoy having been able to refurbish some of my childhood toys for use in my current games. The process is quite simple, drill out rivets, replace missing heads on commanders and gunners, prime, repaint, reassemble, and wash.

Two Battle Kings Artillery Trucks.

 One of the things I have enjoyed about the refurbishment process is discovering what real world vehicles and weapon systems the Battle Kings with generic titles were based on (Such as in this post about the Battle King K-107 155mm SPG click here for details)

Haradian Artillery Prime Mover or Heavy Transport Truck?

I had thought that the Artillery truck was without any basis in the real world until I saw these pictures of International ACCO trucks (click here and here to see them). I was inspired to look for them after seeing a painting of similar trucks towing 5.5inch guns. While the grill of the Battle King is quite different from the ACCO trucks, it is very similar to a grill on a 1970s International Harvester concept vehicle (click here for the picture)  So was the Battle King Artillery Truck based on a concept truck?

Repainted and washed. Now waiting for a name, stats and purpose.

In CD terms in is at least a class IV vehicle, possibly even a class V, but I will leave the stating out the vehicle for another day.

Reworked and original model.

 The photos for this post were taken on my phone, so are even worse quality than usual, but I have used Paul's (From over at Plastic Warriors - If you haven't checked his stuff out already, you really should) trick of cropping them in paint to try and bring the models in as the centre of attention to the photo.

The current collection: 1 to keep, 1 repainted, 1 in process of being repainted.

The plan is to add two of these big behemoths to the Haradi motorpool and as I rather like the look of them, and the nice thing about an imagination is that large possible concept vehicles can occasionally find their way on to the tabletop:)