Salvador Dali's Tank

Salvador Dali was famous for, among other things, painting melted clocks, as in The Persistence of Memory. But it turns out I may have discovered evidence that he dabbled in 1/76th scale armor models too. To wit:

Oh, I can't blame this on Salvador; I did it all myself. This is the ancient Matchbox 1/76th scale Char B1, a French heavy tank from the early days of World War Two. The kit is from the era when Matchbox used to mold their kits in various colors - I think this one was dark green and dark brown. But it isn't the kit or the model that interest me, it's the way the model warped and deformed. Somehow, by some process I never figured out, it ended up spending a few weeks in the back of my pickup truck when we were moving from one house to another. Because of slow contractors, a lack of framers and general bad luck, the new house wasn't ready so we had to live in a hotel room for a month or two, and the poor Char B1 sat in the back of the truck the whole time. Whenever anyone here says "Hot enough for ya?" I always think about my poor Char B. Merde! That's hot!

But curiously, here's it's stablemate, the FT-17. Same kit, same conditions, but a different fate entirely. Other than the tracks, this is actually a pretty nice kit, and obviously it's more heat-resistant than its bigger brother. RPM in Poland makes a much better 1/72nd scale FT-17, but the parts count is daunting; 200 parts, give or take, in a model that isn't even half the size of a White Castle hamburger.

The FT-17 looks pretty anachronistic these days, but it's really the first tank in the modern sense of the word, with a fully-rotating turret on a tracked hull. The bigger British "rhomboid" tanks were probably better suited for the conditions that prevailed in the cratered moonscapes of World War One, but the TOG 1 showed the limits of that approach.