AMT 1/24th Caterpillar D8H

"D8" is one of the few earthmoving phrases to have entered the lexicon of daily life; most people have heard of the D8 even though they might not know what it is. The D8H was one of the most successful dozer designs in history, with a production run than ran from about 1958 until about 1975 or so, when the "improved" D8K was released. Mind you, the D8H underwent substantial change over those years, and this model represents a fairly late D8H with hydraulic actuation, powershift transmission, and a single-shank radial ripper.

This is probably the oldest model in my collection, going on 25 years old at this point, and I think from looking at it you can see how my technique, particularly in regard to weathering, has improved over the years.

AMT got an awful lot right in this kit, but they also got a few things wrong. The "holes" in the armored cover over the radiator are black dots printed on a sticker, for example, and I never liked the radial ripper, either to use or to look at on a model. But the kit's worst feature is its tracks. On paper they sound good - individual track shoes that click together to make a track that actually works; how cool is that? But the track goes together in a way that is entirely unrealistic; it works much more like a tank track than a dozer track, and there's no particularly easy way to fix that problem. The track shoes are also missing the characteristic pattern of bolt heads, typically four per shoe, and in some cases there are two extra empty bolt holes per shoe where one can bolt on ice cleats. The grousers are very tall and very square in section, which is about right for a brand-new track, but I've personally never seen a dozer with such pristine grousers. On this kit, I brought them down to something approaching scale height by trimming them with a knife, every single dang one of them. They're vinyl or polyethylene or something, so they can't be shaped with sandpaper very easily. (One might, as an exercize in frustration, modify one track shoe to eliminate the outside pair of hinge pins and add the bolt heads and then cast up a whole bunch of replacements in fiberglass resin.)

But in general, it's a nice kit. The two main areas that need work are the unrealistic tracks and the dark dots on the radiator cover instead of holes. And there is enormous scope for modification, like adding a blade tilt cylinder, scratchbuilding a four-barrel parallelogram ripper, adding ROPS or EROPS, adding branch risers, or, my personal favorite, adding trash guards and blade extensions to turn it into a landfill machine.

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I painted this kit. Actually, I do know what I was thinking. I was thinking I'd just bought my first airbrush, a Badger, and mixed the chrome yellow paint far too thin, so I really didn't paint the plastic at all; I just changed its sheen a bit. I also hand-brushed Testor's aluminum on the push arms and blade. Aluminum! What was I thinking? I've been around dozers enough to know that running a dozer for any length of time polishes the blade and push arms to an almost mirror-like silver, but no, I had to paint it aluminum. Flat aluminum. Yeah, that's realistic.

Dozer tracks in Arizona, at least on the machines that I was familiar with, never developed much rust. They were always about as brightly polished as the blades, with the exception of an old D7F that blew a final drive and sat for a few weeks; it's the only dozer I ever saw with rusty tracks. So I painted my tracks Testors Chrome. It's realistic, but it doesn't look realistic (and in this picture it actually looks light grey, so I don't know what to think).

The good news is that though this kit is no longer in production (the latest reissue deleted the "Caterpillar" markings and was referred to strictly as a "bulldozer") I have four of them in my stockpile and one day will build this kit again, and do it properly.

The operator, by the way, is a Fujimi figure, a woman in a skirt and halter top. She'd probably look better in a Ferrari, but I enjoy the beauty-and-the-beast angle of putting the trim, pretty sports car driver atop a dozer.