Tag: moc

  • CCKW – The Deuce and a Half That Carried the War

    Let’s start our second post with a truck known as the GMC CCKW a.k.a “Jimmy” or “Deuce-and-a-half”, which is a companion piece to my first post about the Willys Jeep.

    Three variants of the CCKW Truck

    Jimmy was a 2 1⁄2-ton ton 6×6 cargo truck that saw service during WWII and the Korean War. This truck was an important piece of equipment as it supplied the Allied forces during their Normandy campaign and the remainder of the second world war.

    A bit of trivia, the letters CCKW all mean something and was part of GMC nomenclature; “C” – designed in 1941, “C” – conventional cab, “K” – all wheel drive, “W” – dual rear axles.

    These trucks had many variants including, dental operating van, dump truck, fire engine, surgical van and water purification van among many others. I just found it too interesting to not mention these.

    Anyway, I got to work starting with the basic variant and boy did I have to tackle some issues trying to miniaturise a truck. After trying several types of wheels and placements, I eventually went with the skateboard wheels and used clips to hold it to the body of the truck. I employed a few SNOT(studs not on top) techniques for this build as you can see.

    My main issue was getting a 2-stud-wide plate to fit onto a 1 stud body and after experimenting, it fit together pretty nicely with the help of jumper plates.

    Once I was happy with the first one, I made a second version with a dark tan canvas and I’ve seen some versions with a mounted gun on top of the cabin so I added that in. You can also remove the canvas top and add a trooper there.

    The third one, which turned out to be my favourite, is the troop carrier variant and does what it was intended to do. It can hold up to eight nano-soldiers and also uses a variety of brackets and snot bricks in order to get the extra stud coverage.

    I built these trucks to be used as a game piece for Micro Brick Battle but have no idea how to integrate it yet, so much more research to do on that.

    If you like this post, stay tuned and subscribe to my mailing list to get notified when a new post drops! Also, leave a comment and let me know what else you would like to see in future posts. Thanks for reading!

    Here’s a Youtube tutorial if you are interested to build it:

    Tip: Jumper plates are very useful to get an offset from 2 studs to 1, 3 studs to 2 etc. There are different types of jumpers but the most commonly used for me is the 1×2 jumper plate.

  • From Battlefield to LEGO Bricks – Building the Iconic Willys Jeep

    Hello there fellow brick fans and welcome to my very first blog post!

    Today I’ll be sharing my first 1:120 scale model, which is the smallest 4 wheel vehicle in the US Army lineup, and it is none other than the Willys MB(G503), more commonly known as Willys Jeep.

    A little background info, the Willys Jeep was built in large numbers for the United States during World War II(1941-1945) and is an off-road four-wheel drive light utility vehicle. If you’ve watched any WWII show like Saving Private Ryan, Platoon or Band of Brothers, you’ve probably seen this jeep ferrying around troops or supplies.

    So to start my journey into building Micro Brick Battle vehicles, I made this version of the jeep and made sure it could fit some nano soldiers. I quickly found out that to make something so small yet have some functionality is no easy feat. But after some trial and error I ended up with this version you see here.

    Only two points of connection holding this together

    The brackets used for the front look like headlights so I left it open. Then, to finish the model, I added an M2 Browning gun on top and slapped on a sticker to show it’s a US Army vehicle.

    If you are interested to buy these supplementary pieces, you can buy the nano soldiers from Brick Mini, stickers from Brickmania and M2 Browning from our store. The lego parts you can always rummage through your stash or buy from Bricklink.

    I could talk all day about how I made the custom M2 Browning but I’ll just say it was a big pain in the butt and expensive to boot, although they do help to elevate small MOCs like this.

    Of course, I couldn’t stop there, I had to make a few more versions; one with the top cover, one towing a supply trailer and another with a small howitzer.

    The one with top cover cannot fit any men but is nice to look at, whereas the version towing a trailer is just a variation of the jeep with a 1×1 clip attached to the trailer section. Same thing for the one holding a howitzer, I just changed up the clip and bar usage.

    Anyway, if you would like to build one, here’s a tutorial on how:

    Tip: Get to know your brackets, they range from 1×1 to 2×4, come in normal or inverted types. Every one of these can do something a little different.