General Motors 2.5 ton Fuel Truck

I know, I know.  You all are tired of seeing war birds and tanks.  And you’re asking “when will Dave do something really cool like a fuel truck?”


Well the day has come.  After the jump, something really exciting.

Sometimes I really do enjoy doing the common vehicles that inhabited every airfield.  And speaking as someone who works on an airfield, it amazes me how little much of this equipment had changed in 70 years.


This truck is simply the fuel truck modification of the very standard General Motors 2.5 ton Army truck (officially designated CCKW if you’re keeping score!).  Over half a million of these trucks were made by the end of the war; the tanker was a common mod with a 750 gallon tank.


This is the Tamiya kit, and I have to say it was a fun build.  Building cars and trucks is a different rhythm than planes or tanks.  Planes are my baseline, my “normal”.  Typically you paint and build the interior, you seal it up, you build and paint the exterior,  and you’re done.  Tanks have a few tricks I haven’t quite mastered (tracks,  grrrr, grumble…) but are otherwise simpler, at least in my scale.  No interiors.  Basically you build and paint.


But car and truck kit often have “interior” surfaces that are open to the outside world.  Like truck beds, or the hose accessory compartment shown here.  It just seems like you build in more small assemblies, that get completely finished before you move on.  Its hard to explain, but its different.  And mostly its fun.


Up Next: Dewoitine D.520 

About atcDave

I'm 55 years old and live in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I'm happily married to Jodie. I've been an air traffic controller for 33 years; grew up in the Chicago area, and am still a fanatic for pizza and the Chicago Bears. My main interest is military history, and my related hobbies include scale model building and strategy games.
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8 Responses to General Motors 2.5 ton Fuel Truck

  1. Ernie Davis says:

    I always felt it was important to bring a sense of human scale to some of the aircraft I built. The size of the cockpit doesn’t always convey that in the same way familiar vehicles do in my opinion. Quarter-scale must be a bit challenging for some of these though. I know I often found some of the minutia on vehicles challenging in 1/35th scale.

    • atcDave says:

      Yeah vehicles often get pretty fiddly.
      I agree completely about the human element. And not just the figures themselves, the ordinary looking equipment adds an element of reality I think. I’ve really come to enjoy doing the occasional truck or car.

  2. John says:

    Something that has always confused me about World War II era vehicles, some have a white star on the hood and others a white star with a white circle. And I have seen others with a white star and a segmented circle, it seems I have seen all three in the same war zone. I wonder what this significance is.

    • atcDave says:

      I’m not really an expert on vehicle markings, but I would guess most of those differences have to do with time and place. There was a constant conflict between making equipment plainly identifiable to friendly forces, while not making too much of a target for the other guys. Different assembly lines likely painted things differently too. And I would bet the segmented circle is all about a stencil, while some factories/depots may have “filled in” the missing parts of the circle, others didn’t bother.
      Early war they also used a lot more blue stencils. And on occasion yellow insignia.

      I could fill pages on the development of aircraft markings, but vehicles are little less clear to me!

      • John says:

        I read in a book about jeeps that the serial numbers were done with blue stencils to confuse the enemy.Blue didn’t show up well in black-and-white photographs and therefore it was felt that the enemy wouldn’t be able to deduce how many vehicles we had.

      • atcDave says:

        That makes as much sense as anything! I’ve seen the blue stenciling done on early war tanks too, but I believe it was abandoned fairly early on.

  3. Theresa says:

    I loved the sense of proportion that this fuel vehicle gives,

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