I’ve finally gotten round to working out the shape and dimensions of the hull-side bin, and then of course started building it. You can see some of it in the picture with the mat over the barrel, but I’ve never seen a
good photo of it, let alone dimensions, because nobody who writes about Crabs seems to realise they came with a variety of different styles of bins, spare flail chain racks, etc. In the end I had to work it out from two photos:
The first is my subject, T148656, but in the late 1950s after much of the Crab gear had been removed already. This is the third of only three photos I know of the tank that show its right-hand side, and the only one on which you can actually see most of it.
The other photo above is of two other tanks at Westkapelle, of unknown WD number and the first similar but not identical to T148656. Luckily the bin is clearly visible, even if I still had to make educated guesses concerning size and details. Note also the difference in fittings between the front and rear Crabs, despite both being Mk. I vehicles.
With those, I drew up plans in Adobe Illustrator, which I’ve attached to this message for those who want to make a similar bin for a Crab model.
Here’s the basic shape I built from those, still minus some of the detail bits:
Most of this is 0.25 mm plastic card, because the bin was open on the real tank. If it had had the lids on, which were present initially but someone probably “liberated” for re-use elsewhere, I would have made it from thicker card for rigidity.
The three vertical bars (one on each side and one in the middle) were tricky. On photos of the real tank, they seem to be quite thick with ridges along them, so I laminated some plastic strip of two sizes (0.56 mm and 0.84 mm wide, both 0.28 mm thick) to five layers thick, three wide and two narrow, before cutting them to length. This was not helped by me knocking over my glue bottle, but luckily I could get the laminated strip (only two thick at the time) out before everything melted together into a blob.
Close-up that hopefully shows the laminations: