Project Snow Cruiser

Hi folks, Doc here, with something of an experiment. Some months ago while doing research on the Internet, I stumbled across a Website that immediately caught my attention. The subject of the site was a unique motor vehicle called the Snow Cruiser. This vehicle, also known as The Penguin, was designed and built in the late 1930s by the Research Foundation of Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, for use by the U.S. Antarctic Survey. The idea was to build a large vehicle that could be driven across the snow and ice to the South Pole while carrying a limited number of men and supplies. The result of this experiment was the Snowcruiser, an enormous 4-wheeled vehicle (no skids or tracks) that was powered by twin diesel engines and contained a control deck, crew's quarters, a small galley, and multiple storage compartments, plus two spare tires in the tail section. For more information on this amazing creation, including photos, diagrams, and video footage, click HERE and HERE.

I was intrigued by this somewhat ungainly looking vehicle, and recently I decided to try to build my own "scale" model version of the Snow Cruiser. I chose Merkur to construct the model because of the the available selection of scale tires/wheels and wide variety of sizes and shapes of parts, particularly plates. If you've visited any of the Web sites referenced above, you will have noticed that photos of the Snowcruiser show that it was painted bright red. Although Merkur sets contain a number of red painted parts, including some plates, there are not a sufficient number of such parts to build the entire model. As a result, I chose to build with the Classic set, due to its inventory of all metallic finished parts. I added the tires and a few miscellaneous pieces from my M8 set to complete the model. So, I'll just say that my model represents the Snowcruiser in its completed but unpainted form.