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Bit of a rare beastie - an August 1943 Coleman lantern that is considered a 220BX. The oddities (among others) are steel fount, steel operating instructions disc, ceramic burners, and some other parts that are steel rather than brass or aluminum (due to the war effort). Still has what I believe to be the original Glass Globe marked with green "Coleman" on one side and green "Pyrex" on the other.
Found at the Crown Center Antiques Show in 2012 (Kansas City) - and the last stop as we were leaving makes it even better! The man that sold it said it had been on his shelf for over thirty years -and I totally believe this as it was very clean and complete with only minor signs of use and wear.
The train ferry (N/T Villa) that we travelled on, on our way from Catania, Sicily, to Rome, seen through our train window and the windows of Villa San Giovanni station (Italy).
Having photographed various other ferry boats during our crossings each way of the Straits of Messina (Stretto di Messina) this was the only chance I had to photograph our own ferry apart from what we could see of it from the decks while we were on board. This is because passengers have to stay on the train at the ferry terminals on each side, while their train is shunted on to the ship, so they don't get a chance to get off the train and wander around at the stations.
(The blotchiness on the photo is due to reflections from the window of our train compartment. I wondered about editing them out, but it looked too big a task with my limited knowledge of Photoshop!)
THE FERRY BOAT
This train ferry boat (nave traghetto ferroviario) belongs to the Bluvia Fleet (Flotta_FS/Bluvia) of the Sicilian fleet of the Italian State Railways (Ferrovie dello Stato - FS). Our train (from Sicily to Rome) was carried on the lowermost deck. This is actually the second ferry boat to bear the name Villa. It was built in 1985 and displaces about 8000 tonnes. The train deck has four tracks and can hold up to 16 coaches.
----- www.navifs.it/flotta/flotta-fs-sicilia/).
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LONDON - PARIS - CATANIA - ROME - LONDON ----- DAY 7
Photo from the seventh day of our crazy long distance rail trip from home (London) to Sicily. We had had an unscheduled but happy first night stopover in Paris because our Eurostar train out of London was badly delayed due to 'a fatality [unexplained - perhaps fortunately] on the train'. We therefore missed our onward sleeper train connection to Rome, so spent our second day stopover in Paris. We left Paris that evening, on the equivalent sleeper train service a day later. We reached Rome during the third day, where we changed to a daytime train for Catania, Sicily, arriving there the same evening. Our fourth day was our first full day in Sicily, and we spent this in the centre of Catania itself. We spent our fifth day on an excursion to Mount Etna run by GeoEtnaExplorer. We chose this tour company because the guides are geologists. Our particular tour went high up on the flanks on the summit, but not to the summit proper. For this sixth day, our final full day in Sicily, we took the bus from Catania (our base) to Siracusa, in search of Ancient Greek remains, while also getting distracted by other interesting sights, and some excellent ice cream, at various points in the day. But perhaps the most spectacular thing was the huge thunderstorm which hit us in the early part of the afternoon. The seventh day was the start of our homeward journey, for which we took our sixth train of the trip, from Catania and ending with an overnight stop in Rome.
By the end of the whole holiday trip we had seen things and sites from ancient Greek time to modern, so the trip felt like a mini Grand Tour. Or given the rich mythology of Sicily, Etna and the Straits of Messina (Odysseus, the Cyclops, Scylla & Charybdis, etc.) perhaps our trip was like a modern mini Odyssey of our times. Odysseus took ten years to get home. It took us ten trains - but no monsters.
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Darkroom Daze © Creative Commons.
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ID: DSC_6797 - Version 3
8-bit'n the Android logo.
There are a few of these 8-bit versions floating around so this is by no means a novel exercise. I just find it fun and interesting to see how well you could hold certain details.
Just a couple more bits I built for STEAM. The tripod bots are very poseable, and they can just about stand on two legs, leaving on from grabbing.
The little alien walker gun thing was initially self-propelled, hence the head unit with the red eye. But sticking an alien on the back just looked absurd, so naturally I kept it.
The quadbike is an iteration on a UNSC Mongoose I built about 2 decades ago, it feels like. It's a little bulkier over the rear wheels that I'd like, I might try to slim it back down to 4-wide instead of 5. Exploded pic for those who are interested.
And that's my backlog caught up with. For now...
I’ve been wanting to take a city break in summer, rather than in the cold months for a while, so rather than heading for the Lake District for a week of toil on the fells when Jayne could get a week off, we took off from Liverpool for Paris. Flight times were nice and sociable but it meant we were on the M62 car park at a busy time in both directions – it’s a shambles! I’ve stopped over in Paris a dozen times – on my way to cycling in the Etape du Tour in the Alps or Pyrenees – and had a few nights out there. Come to think about it and we’ve spent the day on the Champs Elysees watching the final day of the Tour de France with Mark Cavendish winning. We hadn’t been for a holiday there though and it was a bit of a spur of the moment decision. Six nights gave us five and a half days to explore Paris on foot. I had a good selection of (heavy) kit with me, not wanting to make the usual mistake of leaving something behind and regretting it. In the end I carried the kit in my backpack – an ordinary rucksack – to keep the weight down, for 103 miles, all recorded on the cycling Garmin – and took 3500 photos. The little Garmin is light and will do about 15 hours, it expired towards the end of a couple of 16 hour days but I had the info I wanted by then. This also keeps the phone battery free for research and route finding – I managed to flatten that once though.
What can I say – Paris was fantastic! The weather varied from OK to fantastic, windy for a few days, the dreaded grey white dullness for a while but I couldn’t complain really. We were out around 8.30 in shorts and tee shirt, which I would swap for a vest when it warmed up, hitting 30 degrees at times, we stayed out until around midnight most nights. It was a pretty full on trip. The security at some destinations could have been a problem as there is a bag size limit to save room in the lifts etc. I found the French to be very pragmatic about it, a bag search was a cursory glance, accepting that I was lugging camera gear, not bombs around, and they weren’t going to stop a paying customer from passing because his bag was a bit over size.
We didn’t have a plan, as usual we made it up as we went along, a loose itinerary for the day would always end up changing owing to discoveries along the way. Many times we would visit something a few times, weighing the crowds and light etc. up and deciding to come back later. I waited patiently to go up the Eiffel Tower, we arrived on Tuesday and finally went up on Friday evening. It was a late decision but the weather was good, the light was good and importantly I reckoned that we would get a sunset. Previous evenings the sun had just slid behind distant westerly clouds without any golden glory. It was a good choice. We went up the steps at 7.30 pm, short queue and cheaper – and just to say that we had. The steps are at an easy angle and were nowhere near as bad as expected, even with the heavy pack. We stayed up there, on a mad and busy Friday night, until 11.30, the light changed a lot and once we had stayed a couple of hours we decided to wait for the lights to come on. This was a downside to travelling at this time of year, to do any night photography we had to stay out late as it was light until 10.30. The Eiffel Tower is incredible and very well run, they are quite efficient at moving people around it from level to level. It was still buzzing at midnight with thousands of people around. The sunset on Saturday was probably better but we spent the evening around the base of the Tower, watching the light change, people watching and soaking the party atmosphere up.
Some days our first destination was five miles away, this is a lot of road junctions in a city, the roads in Paris are wide so you generally have to wait for the green man to cross. This made progress steady but when you are on holiday it doesn’t matter too much. Needless to say we walked through some dodgy places, with graffiti on anything that stays still long enough. We were ultra-cautious with our belongings having heard the pickpocket horror stories. At every Café/bar stop the bags were clipped to the table leg out of sight and never left alone. I carried the camera in my hand all day and everywhere I went, I only popped it in my bag to eat. I would guess that there were easier people to rob than us, some people were openly careless with phones and wallets.
We didn’t enter the big attractions, it was too nice to be in a museum or church and quite a few have a photography ban. These bans make me laugh, they are totally ignored by many ( Japanese particularly) people. Having travelled around the world to see something, no one is going to stop them getting their selfies. Selfies? Everywhere people pointed their cameras at their own face, walking around videoing – their self! I do like to have a few photos of us for posterity but these people are self-obsessed.
Paris has obviously got a problem with homeless (mostly) migrants. Walk a distance along the River Seine and you will find tented villages, there is a powerful smell of urine in every corner, with the no alcohol restrictions ignored, empty cans and bottles stacked around the bins as evidence. There are families, woman living on mattresses with as many as four small children, on the main boulevards. They beg by day and at midnight they are all huddled asleep on the pavement. The men in the tents seem to be selling plastic Eiffel Tower models to the tourists or bottled water – even bottles of wine. Love locks and selfy sticks were also top sellers. There must be millions of locks fastened to railings around the city, mostly brass, so removing them will be self-funding as brass is £2.20 a kilo.
As for the sights we saw, well if it was on the map we tried to walk to it. We crossed the Periphique ring road to get to the outer reaches of Paris. La Defense – the financial area with dozens of modern office blocks – was impressive, and still expanding. The Bois de Boulogne park, with the horse racing track and the Louis Vuitton Centre was part of a 20 mile loop that day. Another day saw us in the north east. We had the dome of the Sacre Couer to ourselves, with thousands of tourists wandering below us oblivious of the entrance and ticket office under the church. Again the light was fantastic for us. We read that Pere Lachaise Cemetery or Cimitiere du Pere Lachaise was one of the most visited destinations, a five mile walk but we went. It is massive, you need a map, but for me one massive tomb is much the same as another, it does have highlights but we didn’t stay long. Fortunately we were now closer to the Canal St Martin which would lead us to Parc de la Villette. This was a Sunday and everywhere was both buzzing and chilled at the same time. Where ever we went people were sat watching the world go by, socializing and picnicking, soaking the sun up. As ever I wanted to go up on the roof of anything I could as I love taking cityscapes. Most of these were expensive compared with many places we’ve been to before but up we went. The Tour Montparnasse, a single tower block with 59 floors, 690 foot high and extremely fast lifts has incredible views although it was a touch hazy on our ascent. The Arc de Triomphe was just up the road from our hotel, we went up it within hours of arriving, well worth the visit.
At the time of writing I have no idea how many images will make the cut but it will be a lot. If I have ten subtly different shots of something, I find it hard to consign nine to the dark depths of my hard drive never to be seen again – and I’m not very good at ruthless selection – so if the photo is OK it will get uploaded. My view is that it’s my photostream, I like to be able to browse my own work at my leisure at a later date, it’s more or less free and stats tell me these images will get looked at. I’m not aiming for single stunning shots, more of a comprehensive overview of an interesting place, presented to the best of my current capabilities. I am my own biggest critic, another reason for looking at my older stuff is to critique it and look to improve on previous mistakes. I do get regular requests from both individuals and organisations to use images and I’m obliging unless someone is taking the piss. I’m not bothered about work being published (with my permission) but it is reassuringly nice to be asked. The manipulation of Flickr favourites and views through adding thousands of contacts doesn’t interest me and I do sometimes question the whole point of the Flickr exercise. I do like having access to my own back catalogue though and it gives family and friends the chance to read about the trip and view the photos at their leisure so for the time being I’m sticking with it. I do have over 15 million views at the moment which is a far cry from showing a few people an album, let’s face it, there’s an oversupply of images, many of them superb but all being devalued by the sheer quantity available.
Don’t think that it was all walking and photography, we had a great break and spent plenty of time in pavement bistros having a glass of wine and people watching. I can certainly understand why Paris is top of the travellers list of destinations
A nice stroll through one of the many small rural villages in central Japan.
This was captured with the Zeiss Otus 55mm f1.4 on the D810.
Kicking off this campaign with a relatively straightforward 8-bit make-over. Love how the negative space arrow between the E and x translates into pixels.
my college...
this is the main institute building view from the central lawns.
Another lame attempt at HDR!
Just a random test shot with my Nikon D7100 of any old shite that was laying about, I thought it looked quite arty.
I guess that one of those mad art collectors would offer me millions of pounds for this. :)
ex-WMPTE Fleetline 4041 (XON41J) returns to Aldridge just before midnight, after a hard evening filming.
From the autumn 2016 trip to Vietnam:
If ever there were a good way to finish up a trip, this particular Sunday in October would be it. Before arriving in Hanoi, I honestly had exceptionally low expectations. A bit like Saigon, if you are to go online and try to look up a list of places to visit – basically a tourist’s stock photography checklist, as it may be – you don’t find much that’s appealing. Well…I didn’t, anyway, and as a result, I had pretty low expectations for Hanoi.
The charm and beauty of Hanoi, however, isn’t in any one particular place. It’s in the experience of the entire city. (I’d say the same for Saigon, but multiply that a few times for Hanoi.) On this day in the Old Quarter in particular, I kept finding myself thinking, “Oh, my God, I shouldn’t be this lucky as a photographer…” Today ended up being mostly about people, with a little food and historical locations mixed in.
As I mentioned in the last set of posting, today would start off a bit sad with Junebug leaving for China a day before I would. So, we were checked out of our room by 6:00 in the morning or so. The breakfast at the Art Trendy was wonderful. Buffet with a mix of made-to-order omelets mixed in. Strong work, Art Trendy, strong work…
When June left, I really had nothing to do since it was still six in the morning and I was temporarily homeless as I had to switch hotels. So…I sat around the lobby for about two hours (possibly slightly awkward for the poor girls working there, but oh, well; I had to sit somewhere).
Around 8:00, I finally dragged my old bones out of the hotel and walked the five to ten minutes down the street to the Aquarius, where I politely asked them to hold my non-camera bag until I come back around 1:00 in the afternoon to check in.
After that, I was finally off with my cameras to enjoy an early Sunday morning in the bustling Old Quarter. On the street where the hotel is situated are a number of restaurants where locals were jammed in to enjoy noodles, steamed buns, and the like. It was wonderful to be among that crowd (though someone tried to scold me ever so slightly for taking pictures of people eating).
Since this was right next to St. Joseph’s Cathedral – and it was Sunday morning – I found my way back into the church where we crashed the wedding the afternoon before and realized that I almost got locked into Sunday mass while walking around taking pictures. So…I stayed. I prayed. And my prayer was answered when I realized the side doors and even the back door were open. (Ok…I didn’t really think I was locked in a church, but it did feel like it a little bit.)
Upon exiting the church, a handful of frames under my belt, I walked along the lovely streets photographing shops and people. At Caphe, I piggybacked on someone else’s photo shoot – it looked like they were doing a promo for the place, or possibly just a personal shoot for five women, though I have a feeling it was the former. At any rate, I was quite pleased with that little set and am presenting quite a few of those here, even if they’re a little redundant.
My ultimate goal with this wandering was to find my way to the Hanoi Hilton. Now, I’m not taking about the hotel chain, of course, but rather the prison that U.S. prisoners of war sarcastically called the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. (This is the prison where Senator John McCain was interred while a POW, and there are one or two pictures to that effect here.)
This prison has a particularly interesting history (and morbid since…well…it’s a prison). It’s about a hundred years old and was founded by the French colonialists around the turn of the 20th century. During the first 50 years of its history, the French imprisoned Vietnamese insurgents and those who wanted independence. In the eyes of the French…renegades (hence the imprisonment). In the eyes of the Vietnamese – especially the current government – patriots and national heroes. If they were truly freedom fighters, then I would probably side with the current government on that one.
The French even had a guillotine installed here and overcrowding was a major problem. There were plenty of escape attempts, and more were successful than you may think, which is a little peculiar.
After the battle of Bien Dien Phu and the ejection of the French from the north (and before the U.S. got involved in the south), the prison changed hands and was under control of Ho Chi Minh. During the Vietnam War, it became one of the main prisons for U.S. POWs, as I alluded to above.
The propaganda claims that the Vietcong were absolutely humane and decent with U.S. prisoners, allowing them to observe their religious rites (Christmas celebrations, etc.), allowed prisoners to smoke and enjoy leisure (board games, basketball, etc.), and claimed they were well-fed.
This is certainly how it’s presented in the prison/museum currently. If you were to go online, though, and try to find a contrary report, you would find that this was all coerced and staged to make it appear as if things were on the up and up. (For anyone curious, per my Vietnamese friends, the general education in Vietnam today is how terrible the French and U.S. were for colonizing and torturing the country and keeping it from its independence.)
So, what’s the truth of what really happened? Who knows? Outside of firsthand accounts, it’s impossible to know for certain and even then, memory can be a tricky thing. I tend to like to say the truth is always somewhere between two opposing viewpoints, no matter what the topic may be.
From an impartial and purely photographic point of view, the prison, currently a museum/memorial, is an interesting place to spend an hour or two. Some of the exhibits seem a bit cheesy, but some are quite tasteful and well done. There’s also an informational video. You’ll have to see this with a bit of imagination (the prison, that is), as at least half of it has been leveled for high rise buildings. At least there’s some tangible piece of it left to visit, including the main gate (Maison Centrale).
After about two hours here at the Hanoi Hilton, I walked over towards the Opera House to get a few daytime shots but, really, to get lunch at El Gaucho. I was looking forward to a proper steak. The prices were astronomical (though justifiable based on what I ate), though I just opted for a steak salad. It was so good I contemplated going back for dinner, but had other plans.
With a happy stomach, I went back to finally check in at the Aquarius Hotel and got my workout huffing up six flights of stairs each time I went out. I relaxed here for a few hours until 4:00 when a dear friend of mine came to town to see me.
Ngan and I had an ice cream at Baskin Robbins right in front of St. Joe’s before heading over to the Temple of Literature. This is a temple dedicated to education and, bless my soul, it’s a place where university graduates come for graduation pictures.
On this particular day – a warm, sunny, late Sunday afternoon – it was packed with college students. And it was beautiful to see that many people happy, full of hopes and dreams, and dressed in either cap and gown or traditional Vietnamese clothes. In short…I had a field day shooting for an hour here.
Around 5:00, Ngan had to head back to school, and I went back to my hotel. I had one more meeting. Hoa, who traveled around Thailand & Cambodia with me in May, flew back to see me this evening. She picked me up at 6:00 on her scooter and rode me all around Hanoi by evening.
She started by taking me to Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum (which I consider a lot more photogenic in its setting than the Great Gangster’s Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square). This one, at least, was in a parklike setting. At evening, it’s well-lit and you can find people relaxing in the grass in front of it. During the day, you can visit and there are quite a few buildings behind the mausoleum that you can also see.
After a few minutes here, Hoa took me by West Lake – the largest lake in Hanoi, as I mentioned yesterday – and just drove me around for over an hour, it seemed. My impressions that Hanoi (even out of the Old Quarter) seemed to be a good place to live – though I’d be concerned about the air pollution – and people here seemed to be happy. Also…Vietnamese really love their coffee.
We finally returned to the Old Quarter for dinner at one of the famous restaurants she recommended and she treated me to a wonderful dinner. I can’t recall what we ate (the Vietnamese names of it, anyway), but it was nice.
After dinner, she drove me over towards the Opera House and then, finally, we stopped by Hoan Kiem Lake in the heart of the Quarter and walked around the lake. It was getting close to 10:00 by this time, and I wanted to get back to the hotel to get a few hours sleep before waking up for my early flight in the morning. Hoa came to the airport with me to see me off.
If ever there were a great way to finish a great trip, this was it. I absolutely loved Vietnam – honestly, a lot more than I imagined I would, even with every single person I know who’d ever come here saying what a fantastic country this is – and would gladly come back. This seems to be one of the kinds of countries that you would never get tired of or, if you did, it would sure take a long time. With that, I’ll bid goodbye to Vietnam for now with the hopes that I’ll someday return to this land of amazing food, landscapes, and people.
As always, thanks for dropping by and viewing these pictures. Please feel free to leave any questions or comments and I’ll answer as I have time.
I was a bit disappointed in the diversity of the management team. In a store where 95% of the shoppers and workers were people of color, the management team seems very white. This is in direct contrast to the new ShopRite of Newark, NJ, where the management team was taken directly from the community and much more accurately reflects the shoppers and employees there. Jeff Brown (the owner of this new store) is known for his savvy in operating urban stores which connect with the community, so this was surprising. Hopefully, the team diversifies as the store matures.
One thing was clear to me, in speaking with the workers: these guys were proud as hell to work for the Brown Family. More than once, someone told me "This is a Jeff Brown store..." In this day of giant, faceless retail companies like Walmart, Ahold and Safeway, this was very refreshing--and this attitude reflects really well on the store.
This 65,000 sq. ft. former Pathmark held its Grand Opening as "The Fresh Grocer", just over the Philadelphia border in Cedarbrook Plaza in Wyncote, PA.
Cedarbrook Plaza is a former enclosed mall opened in 1964 with Korvette's and Pantry Pride as its anchor stores. The mall declined in the 80's when both Korvette's and Food Fair/Pantry Pride went bankrupt, and the property was blighted before being de-malled in the 90's. It now functions as an awkward 4-sided shopping plaza. The 65,000 sq. ft. Pathmark was added as an outparcel in 1995 and closed with the bankruptcy of A&P in 2015.
The Fresh Grocer has completely remade the inside of the store, adding a beer garden, hot food bars, a sit-down cafe, and a 5-aisle natural/whole foods section with its own dairy and frozen area. The pharmacy has been removed (shoppers are directed to the nearby ShopRite Pharmacy in the Cheltenham Square Mall, which is also owned and operated by Brown's Superstores) and in its place is a huge customer service counter, replacing the small desk that functioned as Pathmark's customer service.
This is the first new The Fresh Grocer store to open since the company joined the Wakefern Food Cooperative (the ShopRite and PriceRite folks,) in 2013. I believe it is also the first to be owned by anyone other than The Fresh Grocer founder Pat Burns.
The store competes with a Walmart Supercenter in the same shopping plaza.
This cat and I go back a ways. She appeared at my front door with her boyfriend, Big Bad Black Arnie, back in March '07. She was small but probably pregnant. I fed her and her now-deceased black cat buddy since then. She just had a new litter of three pretty kitties that were sired by Arnie. Sometime in October, before she gave birth to her second litter, I tried to trap her in my garage and give her a real life.
You would have thought I was going to cook her for dinner! Two days and two nights she complained, wouldn't eat or drink--worse, she didn't know what the litter box was for and stunk up the garage in several hard to clean areas. The next day I turned her loose again. We stayed friends. She still gets her two squares a day and has brought her kits to me. But they are all outdoor cats in every sense of the word. They harbor no interest in living indoors and one of her little ones demonstrated that to me with a very firm bite!
She is a beautiful, non aggressive lady and she deserves the life she wants!
Addendum: Lil Bit went missing in November 2007 and never showed up again. Her kits were gone too. I think it was animal control. I still miss her.
Just Because (2016)
When I was sent this Shitbox Jimmy record to review, I thought it was a bit funny that the name of their album is The Movie. because the band name immediately makes me think of my very favorite movie. Not that I hear the word shitbox all that often, but when I do it's impossible to not be reminded of The Blues Brothers and the Bluesmobile being referred to as "That shitbox Dodge." So right away this band was putting me in a mindset to want to like them. I also dug the artwork with the unspooled VHS tape. Again, tugging on my nostalgic 80's feelings. Unfortunately, while it's not bad or anything, Shitbox Jimmy's music doesn't really maintain those good vibes as I go through the album.
I think the thing that is the most off putting to me is the vocals. They're really buried in the mix, unnecessarily full of static and nearly impossible to understand. They've kind of got a howling in a cave feel to them, but not in an energetic exciting way like say, The Blind Shake. The way these are recorded kind of make me think they're trying to hide the vocals. I say this as someone who has gone out of their way to hide vocals on things I've recorded with friends.
On the other hand, the music itself is alright. They've got a nice jangly guitar sound that reminds me a bit of the tone Royal Headache is able to achieve. The songs themselves are catchy enough with a bouncy 60's throwback rock and roll vibe to them. I'd probably like this a lot more if the vocals were better, but alas, it just wasn't meant to be.
Shitbox Jimmy - The Movie:
"A heart and a rose.... the perfect elements,
through which it begin a journey
that leads to the vision of some fragments
in a story of passion and pain..."
Visit this location at ...A Bit Of Red... by Kicca Igaly & Nessuno Myoo in Second Life
Slowly the rusty bits are being cleaned and painted up. The Dodge itself needs a number of jobs completed before we can start on the axle re assembly. The Springs, hangers and axle beam will be the first bits to go back on the bus once restored. The springs and shackles all need re-bushing so not a fast job as they all need cut out and new ones pressed in which I do not like doing.
Some of the random 8-bit NES junk i've picked up here. The ? block is a portable speaker that also plays a Mario sound effect when you hit a button on top. The three diorama figures play short sound clips from the games pictured when you push the buttons on their bases.
A bit more progress on the body and tread.
References:
1. My own damaged mind.
2. rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-51517/Tarix819/vickers-m1936-lig...
3. forum.mousedroidbuilders.club/ and www.facebook.com/groups/248862279225/