Plastic Soldier Company kits have been fun for my son and me to work on together. By offering two, three, four or, as in this case, seven vehicles in one box, the product line allows us to share the work (while also adding a ton of plastic to the collection…).

Here you see PSC’s Universal Carrier Variants — seven different specialized versions of the familiar vehicle often known to me as a “Bren carrier” — and the 6-pdr with Lloyd Carrier. The vehicles are small and don’t have too many parts, but because there are so many of them to make and so many accompanying figures to paint, the project can take a long time!

PSC kits do not include decals. Why? Because the modeler/collector might have any number of historical units they want to mimic, and it’s not going to be just one vehicle’s worth of decals. Given the virtually infinite palette of possibilities, PSC just leaves it to you to decide how you want to dress them. Up to now, I had always gotten away with using only spare decals from other kits. This method results in a mish-mash of unit markings on my army’s vehicles, but that’s o.k. Who’s ever going to see them? (Ah, I guess YOU are… Oh, well!)

Knowing I had a lot of British vehicles in the PSC pipeline, including a set of Sherman Vs, last year I purchased a sheet of Normandy-specific British Army vehicle markings from Peddinghaus. It turned out still to be quite challenging to try to figure how to mark the models in a way that seemed at all historically accurate. (I don’t care all that much about accuracy, but I like to do what I can when I can.) Even with Dennis Oliver’s Tank Craft book on Normandy Shermans, I found the British system of unit markings hard to decipher. The most helpful resource in the end was a Flames of War summary I found here. If you wanted to be really strict, I’m sure my decals might give you lots to snicker at, but I finally decided that since I have a collection built over decades there is no way I could impose any consistency on it all, so there is “a little of this and a little of that.”