What if

In the 1960s, the USA and West Germany started a programme to design the next-generation main battle tank (MBT) for their armies, to replace the current M48s and M60s they were using with something state-of-the-art, able to take on the expected hordes of Warsaw Pact tanks and still come out on top. It was also to be well-protected against nuclear, chemical and biological (NBC) weapons and be able to operate on a battlefield contaminated with them. Furthermore, it was to be built in both countries, with some differences to account for their own preferences.

From the start, the plan was ambitious and ran into all kinds of problems, starting with something as basic as which units to use: the Germans wanted to design and build it in metric, the Americans in their own what-passes-for-a-system. A compromise was eventually reached: each would design the components they were responsible for in their own units, but any mating surfaces and other interfaces would be in metric. Other points of contention were the vehicle's armament (the Americans wanted a 152 mm gun capable of launching missiles, the Germans wanted a conventional 120 mm gun), the engine (Americans: air-cooled diesel, Germans: liquid-cooled multi-fuel), and more. However, they persevered and eventually produced prototypes that proved the project worked:

(The aspect ratio on that video is off, somebody seems to have stretched it to widescreen when it originally wasn't.)


At this point, the vehicle was still known as the MBT 70 (Main Battle Tank 70) in the USA, and as the KPz 70 (Kampfpanzer 70) in West Germany. The videos show many of the tank's advanced features: high mobility from a powerful engine and a hydropneumatic suspension that gave a smooth ride and allowed the tank's ground clearance to be varied, the ability to quickly change the engine in the field, the American 152 mm gun/launcher M170 (with an autoloader in the rear of the turret), and more.

The most notable things, though, other than the gun/launcher, were first of all that the driver was located in the turret rather than the hull. His station was at the left front, with a cupola that automatically rotated in the opposite direction of the turret so he always faced forward, and had three large periscopes for vision. In case of damage to one, they could be quickly swapped around, and if that wasn't possible, the cupola could also be switched to always have one of the two side periscopes face forward instead. The reason to put the driver in the turret is often misrepresented: the real one was due to the required NBC protection, which was to include a thick polyethylene liner to shield against neutron bombs. By putting the driver in with as the rest of the crew, only one compartment needed to be shielded rather than two. The drawing below shows the prototypes' armour thicknesses, with the grey lines being the polyethylene anti-radiation shielding:

KPz 70 armour.jpg

The second most notable feature was the anti-aircraft armament. Rather than putting a machine gun on the commander's hatch, the vehicle had a complete remote-control turret with a 20 mm Rh 202 cannon and dual ammunition feed, aimed and fired entirely from under armour by the commander from his station. The gun folded out of the way when not needed, with its barrel pointing rearward along the left side of the turret roof and armoured shields covering the subturret's open top.

Differences between the German and American tanks were mostly the engine, as mentioned; this lead to different engine decks and hull rears to accommodate them. The American tanks can be easily recognised by the engine deck having two row of grilles on the front engine deck, below the turret bustle, and a simple flap covering a wide opening in the hull rear. The German tanks, on the other hand, have two circular air intakes on the rear of the engine deck, behind the turret, and a large grille in the rear plate. Other differences are in the smoke launchers (four each side on American tanks, eight on German) and the front and rear lights and other minor fittings.

Though testing revealed a number of teething problems, this was not unexpected, of course, and by the early 70s, the tank was ready for production. In the US Army, it was adopted as the 152-mm Gun Tank M70, officially nicknamed Krueger after the German-American general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Krueger) (though nobody seems to have realised he had a namesake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kr%C3%BCger_(Wehrmacht_general)) that makes this slightly awkward). In the German Bundeswehr, it became known as the Kampfpanzer Keiler ("Wild Boar"). From here, though, both countries' vehicles soon began to diverge as each started improvement programmes that weren't really synchronised very well.

In the 1960s, the British had developed Chobham armour, that offered markedly better protection against shaped charges than the spaced armour the M70 had been developed with, and soon shared its secret with the Americans. This soon lead to the turret design being improved to incorporate this new armour, discarding its previous curved shape because Chobham-type armour cannot be made round. Instead, a turret with flat, sloping front plates and a new, angular mantlet were installed, as well as deep side skirts over the suspension. At the same time, the 20-mm gun was replaced by a .50-caliber M85 machine gun, the Americans never really having liked the gun forced on them by the Germans in return for accepting the 152-mm gun/launcher. The Germans meanwhile upgraded their Keilers by removing that same gun/launcher and replacing it by a new Rheinmetall 120 mm smoothbore gun, still fed by an autoloader but with increased capacity due to the smaller rounds, as well as improving the armour while keeping its original shape. Both these versions came into service in the late 1970s, almost at the same time.

By the early 1980s, though, the US Army was starting to tire of the 152 mm gun/launcher it had expected so much of. In all three vehicles fitted with it (M551, M60A2 and M70), it proved very troublesome in all manner of ways, leading to the early retirement of the M60A2 and the removal of M551s from most units except ones that actually needed its light weight (mainly airborne ones). The German 120 mm gun looked like a good solution for the M70, so after some redesign of both gun and tank, it was adopted in 1983 as the M256 gun, being installed in an M70A1 turret that had been further improved. The main change, other than the autoloader and other internal changes, was to install blast panels in the roof over the autoloader, so that an ammunition explosion would be vented upwards away from the crew. This was standardised as the M70A2 in 1984 and began to be delivered to front-line units in Germany soon, replacing original M70s first, followed by M70A1s that were sent back to the USA to be reworked to the latest configuration.

In this guise, the M70 took part in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. It proved to be an outstanding tank in its first actual combat deployment, silencing most of its remaining detractors with its mobility, firepower and armour protection.

How did they manage to get past the drivers becoming so disorientated that many of them threw up after only a very short time driving the vehicle? :unsure:

They installed a rack for ten examples of the Bag, Sick, M180A2 on the left side of the the driver's module. This is one area where the American version was more advanced than the German one, in which the Dutch Army's drivers had to make do with empty frietzakjes.

And on to the model :) About four years ago, on another forum there was going to be a "what-if" group armour build, and I thought an updated MBT 70 would be fun. Unfortunately it turned out that the person running the GB had very much "Wehrmacht 1946", or at least "Second World War unbuilt prototypes", in mind and wouldn't allow anything post-war. Didn't stop me from buying a Dragon KPz 70 kit (https://www.scalemates.com/kits/dragon-3550-mbt-70-kpz-70--243607) and upgrading it, though:

Dragon KPz 70.jpg

Though it says "MBT-70 (KPz. 70)" on the box, the model is very definitely the latter and not the former (BTW, I tend to use MBT 70 to refer to the American tank and KPz 70 for the German one), but my idea was an American tank in the Gulf War, so I now had great fun trying to work out what to change to turn the model in that. My main reference for this was Hunnicutt's Abrams: A History of the American Main Battle Tank, which doesn't just cover the M1 Abrams but also the MBT 70 and XM803 that went before it.

Because of the different engine, I needed to remove the whole engine deck from the upper hull:

IMG_5546.jpeg

After puttying shut the grille on the side, I closed the hole at the front of the engine deck, recessing that a little compared to the rest of the deck (by simply glueing it to the underside of the deck plates), and put an I-beam in across to give it some strength:

IMG_5549.jpeg

After that I cut pieces of plastic card and mesh from an old kit (the type supplied to put mesh into stowage racks and things):

IMG_5550.jpeg

This all makes a sandwich of stuff to recreate the intake grilles:

IMG_5558.jpeg

The rear part of the engine deck is wider because ... well, if I'm honest, because I didn't realise the difference here was due to early vs. late prototypes. Early prototypes had snorkels along the sides of the engine deck, under long, narrow hatches, but these were deleted later and the sides of the engine compartment were sloped instead. So the M70A2 still has those, maybe the spaces were retained for stowage?

In any case, the next step was:

IMG_5560.jpeg

... to cut all of that back out again :( I suddenly remembered that I also own a copy of Spielberger's Waffensysteme Leopard 1 und Leopard 2 and wondered if that covers the KPz 70 too. Turns out it does, and it includes what appears to be scale drawings of the American version — which showed that 1) my measurements in the drawings in Hunnicutt's book were off, 2) the forward removable part of the engine deck was wider on the  American tank than on the German one, and 3) my assumption about the direction of the mesh was wrong too (I had made it diagonal, turns out it was square). Let's do it all again!

IMG_5569.jpeg

With a different mesh, but also more accurate dimensions. In the photo above I've also added plastic strip for the frames around the mesh, as well as more detail to the engine deck.

This is going to be good I can tell  ;D  :thumbsup:

What are ya going to do with the main gun mate?
Going to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

Oh I like this  :wub:  :thumbsup:

Gondor

This is really cool! Looks like the whole front of the turret gets rebuilt too. Then you have a big fat 152mm gun barrel to play with.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 11:03:35 AMGoing to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

I'm guessing a Rheinmetall Rh-120 L/44, as per the Leo 2.

(Mostly a terminology difference but I'm sure the US manufactured gun differs from the German version somewhere along the line.)


Excellent work on the build, so far, Jakko! :thumbsup:

BTW, your scratch-fu is very strong!  ;)

Quote from: Old Wombat on April 25, 2023, 07:16:01 PM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 11:03:35 AMGoing to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

I'm guessing a Rheinmetall Rh-120 L/44, as per the Leo 2.

(Mostly a terminology difference but I'm sure the US manufactured gun differs from the German version somewhere along the line.)


Excellent work on the build, so far, Jakko! :thumbsup:

Guy there the same gun ..M256 is just the US designation for the Rh-120 L44.
I do wonder if at some point the US will install the L55 gun into a Abrams..it's quite a bit more powerful than the L44 .
The Leo 2A6 and 7 both use the L55 and they are extremely lethal tank guns.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 07:50:51 PM

Quote from: Old Wombat on April 25, 2023, 07:16:01 PM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 11:03:35 AMGoing to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

I'm guessing a Rheinmetall Rh-120 L/44, as per the Leo 2.

(Mostly a terminology difference but I'm sure the US manufactured gun differs from the German version somewhere along the line.)


Excellent work on the build, so far, Jakko! :thumbsup:

Guy there the same gun ..M256 is just the US designation for the Rh-120 L44.
I do wonder if at some point the US will install the L55 gun into a Abrams..it's quite a bit more powerful than the L44 .
The Leo 2A6 and 7 both use the L55 and they are extremely lethal tank guns.

Technically the same, but the US tends to use their own manufacturing techniques, fixings, bolts, etc., & these tend to mean that parts for the US M256 won't, necessarily, be interchangeable with those of Rheinmetall guns.

L/44 or L/55 would depend on whether Jakko was building an early or late version of the KPz 70 - A point which has just made me realise that he's building the US MBT 70 which makes the whole Rheinmetall thing moot. (Oops! :rolleyes: )

An example of how the US differs from European manufacturing is the use of alternative fasteners, screws and bolts and nuts and so on.  The Merlin engine in WWII was given to Ford for them to license produce it and they decided to use American fasteners in it's redesign.  The result was that the engine ended up substantially different.  So different that you could not mix the two.  US manufactured engines were almost completely different to British produced or even Canadian produced versions.  This was repeated in the famous Vickers 105mm L7 gun.  The British used one version and the Americans another.  The most obvious difference was the fume extractor.  The British version was symmetrical, the American version was not.  The two guns are not interchangeable.  There are, I don't doubt other examples but they are the two that immediately spring to mind.   :banghead:

Yippeee... really like what I see already :thumbsup:

Very neat work sir  :thumbsup:

Quote from: Old Wombat on April 25, 2023, 09:36:38 PM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 07:50:51 PM

Quote from: Old Wombat on April 25, 2023, 07:16:01 PM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 11:03:35 AMGoing to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

I'm guessing a Rheinmetall Rh-120 L/44, as per the Leo 2.

(Mostly a terminology difference but I'm sure the US manufactured gun differs from the German version somewhere along the line.)


Excellent work on the build, so far, Jakko! :thumbsup:

Guy there the same gun ..M256 is just the US designation for the Rh-120 L44.
I do wonder if at some point the US will install the L55 gun into a Abrams..it's quite a bit more powerful than the L44 .
The Leo 2A6 and 7 both use the L55 and they are extremely lethal tank guns.

Technically the same, but the US tends to use their own manufacturing techniques, fixings, bolts, etc., & these tend to mean that parts for the US M256 won't, necessarily, be interchangeable with those of Rheinmetall guns.

L/44 or L/55 would depend on whether Jakko was building an early or late version of the KPz 70 - A point which has just made me realise that he's building the US MBT 70 which makes the whole Rheinmetall thing moot. (Oops! :rolleyes: )

Hahaha ..the real main differences would be you'd think be the measurements but the military run in metres and millimeters .
The Rh120 is made in the metric world and so is the US one..keeps the manufacturing simple..have ya noticed that apart from  50cal ..which is 12.7mm and .45 ACP everything else is metric..5.56..7.62..9mm.
They call the gun the M256 120mm not the M256 4.72in.
Yeah I know it's weird how the USA live with feet and inches but the military have been using metric since just before the Vietnam War.
Watch enough Vietnam War movies and you'll hear something is half a click down the road at some point 😀

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 11:03:35 AMWhat are ya going to do with the main gun mate?
Going to upgrade to the M256 120mm ?

Yes, it will have an M256 gun from an old Tamiya M1A1 kit.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 25, 2023, 07:50:51 PMGuy there the same gun ..M256 is just the US designation for the Rh-120 L44.

I think there are some manufacturing differences, probably in order to suit US methods and tooling. Chances are they converted most measurements to US customary units, for all I know — they seem to feel a need to do that kind of pointless thing :)

Quote from: rickshaw on April 25, 2023, 09:54:37 PMThis was repeated in the famous Vickers 105mm L7 gun.  The British used one version and the Americans another.  The most obvious difference was the fume extractor.  The British version was symmetrical, the American version was not.

They're also different on the inside of the turret: the British L7A1 has a squared-off breech with a horizontally sliding block, the American M68 has an almost cylindrical breech with a vertically sliding block. (The L7A3 fitted to Leopard 1 is like the L7A1 but has the rear part of the top of the breech cut off at an angle, so it won't hit the turret roof at full depression.)

Quote from: rickshaw on April 25, 2023, 09:54:37 PMThere are, I don't doubt other examples but they are the two that immediately spring to mind.   :banghead:

Hell, they even managed it with Bailey bridges ... A British invention, designed to Imperial measurements. The Americans start making them too, and because of different engineering practices, you can't build a bridge using parts from both countries — they just won't fit together properly. For this reason, the British kept their Bailey parts painted in SCC 2 (a milk-chocolate brown) even though that had been replaced as the standard colour for Europe in early 1944, while American parts were finished in US olive drab: easy to tell by colour which parts would fit together and which won't.

The Americans weren't the only ones doing this, of course. The UK redesigned the FAL in Imperial measurements for manufacture in the UK, Canada and Australia to produce the L1A1/C1A1, resulting in some parts not being interchangeable with "metric" FALs, and you can use the magazine from one in the other, but not vice versa (I always forget which, though).

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 26, 2023, 12:43:11 AMYeah I know it's weird how the USA live with feet and inches but the military have been using metric since just before the Vietnam War.

NATO land forces went metric mainly because they expected to do their fighting in Germany and because the majority of NATO countries were not the USA and UK. American gun calibres (other than small arms) were changed to metric during the Second World War, because most of the USA's artillery could trace its lineage to French guns acquired during the First World War, and of course those were 75 mm, 105 mm, 155 mm, etc. This is why (for example) the M4 medium tank had a 75 mm gun. However, the US at the time also used a bunch of weapons designated in inches, but the decision was taken at some poont to reduce confusion as to which was larger by designating them all in metric. Which means that, for most of the Second World War, it's correct to refer to the 8-inch howitzer M1, but the exact same weapon used in Vietnam was called the 203-mm howitzer M115.

Yeah it's easy to sort with the big guns as yep alot of early American guns and howitzers were of French origin but crew served weapons were even thru the Korean conflict still being called by the same thing they had since WW1.
The Brits had the Lee Enfield .303in/7.7mm rifle and machine guns..the US had .30cal everything and everything was called a .30 cal be it a M1 Gerand..M2 Carbine ..1908 Springfield 30.06 ..freaking love that rifle by the way and still regret selling that.
Having many friends in quite a few different militaries around this planet I did get to yap with em ..or shooting the poop..not the right word there  ;D 
Tankers was one of my targets for knowledge as im a armour modeller and the best info is from the horses mouth and ya do find out some quite useful crap ..course the tank crews don't change main guns ..armourers do that and I did find out something form your neck of the woods matey..Challenger 2..all the hull measurements are all Imperial and the entire turret is metric..yup the REMEs have to carry two sets of tools just to work on it.. :o
One thing which I would not be surprised about is the way the Germans do contracts and Rheinmetall is quite notorious for this and that's when you sign a contract or license what they say.. you have to do ..you can't even sell a Leo 2 tank without their expressed permission even tho you might own it ...pretty damn sure the Rh-120 would be no different.

Quote from: Jakko on April 26, 2023, 02:19:52 AMHell, they even managed it with Bailey bridges ... A British invention, designed to Imperial measurements. The Americans start making them too, and because of different engineering practices, you can't build a bridge using parts from both countries — they just won't fit together properly. For this reason, the British kept their Bailey parts painted in SCC 2 (a milk-chocolate brown) even though that had been replaced as the standard colour for Europe in early 1944, while American parts were finished in US olive drab: easy to tell by colour which parts would fit together and which won't.

As an aside, the very first piece of a Bailey Bridge, the prototype section indeed, is currently part of a car park barrier about a mile from my house. The company who now builds such bridging sections, Mabey & Johnson, have their factory in Lydney, where I live, and they also had one of my employer's test systems too. Needless to say they had a VERY fast service response time!  ;D

Here it is, still being useful.

Bailey_Bridge_#1a.jpg

Bailey_Bridge_#1b.jpg 

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 26, 2023, 03:13:27 AMChallenger 2..all the hull measurements are all Imperial and the entire turret is metric..yup the REMEs have to carry two sets of tools just to work on it.. :o

That's also why the M113-series was not overly popular in the Bundeswehr: fitters had to carry a second set of tools specifically for them, because every nut and bolt was in American sizes. Oh, and come to think of it: Centurion Mk. 7 in the Dutch Army. Those used different threads than the Mk. 5, which was the mainstay in the 1960s. Spanners would have fit, of course, but the logistics problem of having to stock two different bolts for everything was part of the reason why all the Mk. 7s delivered spent almost 100% of their time in mobilisation complexes.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 26, 2023, 03:13:27 AMOne thing which I would not be surprised about is the way the Germans do contracts and Rheinmetall is quite notorious for this and that's when you sign a contract or license what they say.. you have to do ..you can't even sell a Leo 2 tank without their expressed permission even tho you might own it ...pretty damn sure the Rh-120 would be no different.

That is the German government, though, not Rheinmetall. It has two reasons: Germany doesn't want their equipment being sold to a warring party whose ideals run counter to Germany's, and it also gives Germany the option of refusing a country to sell stuff to someone so that Germany can then sell the same stuff to them instead.

Quote from: PR19_Kit on April 26, 2023, 04:25:45 AMAs an aside, the very first piece of a Bailey Bridge, the prototype section indeed, is currently part of a car park barrier about a mile from my house.

That is very cool, and nice they put up a plaque to tell people what they're looking at, too.

Continuing with the model, I also replaced the whole hull rear plate:

IMG_5610.jpeg

I just copied the kit part in plastic card, though with square upper corners to fit the new engine deck. In retrospect, I should have just cut and filed the unnecessary details off the kit plate and added those corners, it would have been about as much work. The rear lights are from a Tamiya Bradley, with the side glued to the hull filed at an angle so the lights are horizontal relative to the ground. The real MBT 70 had very different tail lights (the same kind as used on the M60 and back to before the Second World War) as well as an infantry telephone on the rear, but my reasoning was that the M70A1 would have gotten the more modern lights that were being used from the 1970s on, like on the Bradley and the real-world M1 Abrams.

The lifting eyes are kit parts, the rest is mostly scratchbuilt from plastic card. The round lids on the engine deck were made from very thin plastic card (Tamiya Pla-Paper that I've had for 35 years or so) with a hole punch for two-ring binders, which produces 6 mm discs. Not recommended for thicker card, as it bends the discs into a curve, but the Pla-Paper is easily flattened again.

On the engine deck, I added antislip texture:

IMG_5636.jpeg

This is acrylic texture gel, sold for artists, with beach sand sprinkled in. River sand or construction sand is too coarse, while beach sand is much finer (at least in my part of the world), and as I live literally a few minutes' walk from the beach, I've got an unlimited supply of the stuff anyway :)

At the front of the hull sides, I noticed the MBT 70 had a different profile to the KPz 70. This photo illustrates it quite well:

IMG_5620.jpeg

The drawing is a scan from Hunnicutt's Abrams, enlarged to 1:35 scale. If you look closely, you can see the KPz 70 (model) hull side comes to a sharp point at the front and angles to about the third roadwheel position before becomign horizontal, but the MBT 70's hull angles down much more steeply to above the second roadwheel. Again, at the time I didn't yet realise this was because of differences between early and late prototypes (and the Americans only built early ones while the Germans built both) so I set about correcting the kit.

(The tape is for the antislip coating, which obviously isn't there yet on the model because this photo was taken before the previous one :))

First, I removed a few millimetres of width along the hull side, leaving just the bit of mudguard at the front:

IMG_5621.jpeg

I then trimmed the underside to be equal with the sponson underside, which is moulded as part of the lower hull, and the upper hull overhangs it:

IMG_5621.jpeg

I could then add a piece of plastic card of the right thickness (1.5 mm) to make up the lost material, but going far enough forward to reach the point where the MBT 70's angle starts:

IMG_5623.jpeg

Followed by a sloping piece to make that angled section:

IMG_5626.jpegIMG_5627.jpeg

Then it was just a matter of filling the gap with putty and filing and sanding it all smooth:

IMG_5635.jpeg

Master class  :thumbsup:

As an aside and going back to gun calibres we Brits continued to use weight as a means of sizing our artillery pieces long after the rest of the world had moved on  :angel:  Then at some point, WWI ?, started to use weight for some and inches for others  ;)

Quote from: NARSES2 on April 26, 2023, 06:24:51 AMMaster class  :thumbsup:

Thanks :)

Quote from: NARSES2 on April 26, 2023, 06:24:51 AMThen at some point, WWI ?, started to use weight for some and inches for others  ;)

It took until after the Second World War for the British Army to fully change over, probably due to NATO standards. You had things like 6- and 25-pounder guns but also 4.5- and 5.5-inch ones. Oh, and for added fun: a 3-inch mortar that was not 76 mm but actually 81 mm (about 3.2 inches) calibre like everyone else's. But, of course, in that respect the pre-war Dutch army had much the same problem: a kanon van 7 Veld ("gun of 7 Field") was a 7.5 cm gun, for example — I would have rounded that to 8 myself, but hey ...

The RN started the transition to inch bores & calibres at around the turn of the 19th-to-20th Centuries with the advent of the pre-dreadnoughts & the dreadnoughts cemented the change - for main guns, anyway, they were still using 6-pounders & 2-pounders (40mm Vickers machine guns, a.k.a. the Pom-Pom gun) & the like to the end of WW2, though.

Quote from: Jakko on April 26, 2023, 10:20:43 AMBut, of course, in that respect the pre-war Dutch army had much the same problem: a kanon van 7 Veld ("gun of 7 Field") was a 7.5 cm gun, for example — I would have rounded that to 8 myself, but hey ...

Round to the even number is what I was taught  :thumbsup:

What, so 6.9 rounds to 6 but 7.1 rounds to 8? That makes no sense to me whatsoever :) What I was always taught is that anything ≥ .5 rounds up to the nearest whole number, everything < .5 rounds down instead.

Quote from: Jakko on April 27, 2023, 01:29:12 AMWhat, so 6.9 rounds to 6 but 7.1 rounds to 8? That makes no sense to me whatsoever :) What I was always taught is that anything ≥ .5 rounds up to the nearest whole number, everything < .5 rounds down instead.

No sorry what I should have said was that you round point .5 to the nearest even all others are as you were taught.  So 2.5 rounds to 2 and 3.5 to 4. 

Jakko mate I'm lovin this build..been wanting someone to go bonkers on something like this  :thumbsup:

Oh I can imagine the nightmare we'd have in the army if numbers were rounded up ..8in is 203 mm ..7.5in is 190.5mm ..one thing they absolutely can't do without in the military is accuracy with numbers that why everything is in triplicate.
If it's 8in then it's 8in ..in engineering we never round up or down  ...we cut a couple of mill more then fit it from there..always easier to remove than add especially with 30mm plate ..which I was working with a couple of weeks ago.
Shops tho that's a whole different matter..they always go up here even if it's a smeg under .5

Interestingly, the Soviets used to round certain calibres one way or the other to differentiate between the weapons that used those rounds, so 105mm rockets became 107mm supposedly,  Apparently, Stalin ordered them to prevent foulups in the logistic system. :banghead:

People come up to the counter at work and ask me for "about five stamps" and look at me oddly when I try to sell them six.

 ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D

Looking forward to more of this! Have you considered paint yet? Sand or NATO camo? It seemed to be luck of the draw wether a vehicle was painted sand or not. Then later replacement parts could be sand or not. It became a real hodge podge of paint colors.

Quote from: NARSES2 on April 27, 2023, 01:38:56 AMNo sorry what I should have said was that you round point .5 to the nearest even all others are as you were taught.  So 2.5 rounds to 2 and 3.5 to 4. 

That still makes no sense to me :) Different school systems perhaps ...

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 27, 2023, 01:51:38 AMalways easier to remove than add especially with 30mm plate ..which I was working with a couple of weeks ago.

I know someone who owns the last-known Caterpillar D6A armoured dozer that still has some of its original armour on it. He's restoring it to its full armoured cab, 22 mm steel all round (though he's using regular steel, not armour plate). He had the plates cut and welded up, and when installing it, found he had made a 2 cm mistake in a small cutout to go over the winch. He didn't seem to have the opinion that it was easy to remove that bit so the cab would fit ;)

Quote from: rickshaw on April 27, 2023, 03:48:17 AMInterestingly, the Soviets used to round certain calibres one way or the other to differentiate between the weapons that used those rounds, so 105mm rockets became 107mm supposedly,  Apparently, Stalin ordered them to prevent foulups in the logistic system. :banghead:

The USA and the UK did much the same at times. The British 77 mm gun (as used in the Comet cruiser tank) used the same projectiles as the 17-pounder, which was 3″ = 76 mm calibre, but deliberately designated 1 mm larger to prevent soldiers and logistics systems confusing the two. Same with the American 106 mm recoilless rifle M40, which fired 105 mm rounds but of a different type than the 105 mm RCL M27, so to avoid problems they again changed what the calibre was called rather than what it actually was.

This contrasts with things like the German 77 mm field guns from the First World War, which were actual 77 mm calibre. It was deliberately chosen because the French had 75 mm guns, so in case of a war they wouldn't be able to adapt German guns to use French ammo, but the Germans would be able to bore out captured French guns.

Quote from: kerick on April 27, 2023, 07:32:37 AMLooking forward to more of this! Have you considered paint yet?

I have — the model has been finished for some time, and it's painted in sand colour. Photos of M1A1s in the Gulf War almost invariably show them in sand, so that's what I went for with this one too. But I'm getting ahead of myself :)

Continuing with the hull, I built the lids for the boxes than the early prototypes had, and which the M70 inherited:

IMG_5637.jpeg

These are simply per the drawings in Hunnicutt's book, cut from thin plastic card. On the hull, I had to add some extra plastic card fillets to complete the bins, but other than that these were simple enough to make:

IMG_5638.jpegIMG_5639.jpeg

The strengtheners are half-round rod, the other fixtures are scraps of strip and stuff.

On the glacis plate, I also had to make new headlights, because the real MBT 70s had the same type of headlight as on the M60 tank, under a brush guard, while the KPz 70 had more Leopard-style lights with no brush guard. The German tank also had a gun travel lock that the American one lacked. After removing the plates that the German headlights were to sit on (not shown, I did that a lot earlier than making the actual lights), I settled on headlamps from the Tamiya Bradley — you get a set of spares in each of their Bradley kits, and two in the M2A2 kit because that has different lights altogether, but the original ones are still in it too. I made the brush guards from copper wire:

IMG_5648.jpeg

The legs are far too long on purpose so I could bend them into shape before cutting them to size:

IMG_5649.jpeg

And on the model, with the Bradley lights:

IMG_5650.jpeg

The mudguards also got a piece added:

IMG_5653.jpeg

I did that mainly because having mudguards end in a horizontal piece means a lot of crap will get thrown straight forward and make a mess all over the place, so a curved section seems likely. The KPz 70 mudguards appear to have anticipated this, as there is a hollow tube on them that looks designed to take a mudguard extension, so I simply modelled the curved section as if it attaches to that.

Quote from: Jakko on April 27, 2023, 10:48:44 AM

Quote from: rickshaw on April 27, 2023, 03:48:17 AMInterestingly, the Soviets used to round certain calibres one way or the other to differentiate between the weapons that used those rounds, so 105mm rockets became 107mm supposedly,  Apparently, Stalin ordered them to prevent foulups in the logistic system. :banghead:

The USA and the UK did much the same at times. The British 77 mm gun (as used in the Comet cruiser tank) used the same projectiles as the 17-pounder, which was 3″ = 76 mm calibre, but deliberately designated 1 mm larger to prevent soldiers and logistics systems confusing the two. Same with the American 106 mm recoilless rifle M40, which fired 105 mm rounds but of a different type than the 105 mm RCL M27, so to avoid problems they again changed what the calibre was called rather than what it actually was.

This contrasts with things like the German 77 mm field guns from the First World War, which were actual 77 mm calibre. It was deliberately chosen because the French had 75 mm guns, so in case of a war they wouldn't be able to adapt German guns to use French ammo, but the Germans would be able to bore out captured French guns.

Actually, it is much easier to create new rounds of a near enough calibre than you appear to think.  During WWII, the Germans captured large numbers of Soviet weapons.  The 76.2mm field guns were supposedly a greater calibre than 75mm rounds but the Germans easily modified the rounds just by adding a larger driving ring initially and later reboring them to a smaller calibre gun tube and chamber in 75mm calibre.  When they adopted the Czech 47mm AT Gun, they just manufactured new ammunition for once the Czech supplies ran low.  The British remanufactured German 75mm HE rounds in 1942 when their own supplies of 75mm which was an American calibre rather than one of their own, ran low.  That involved removing in the fuzes and changing the driving rings and re-adding the fuzes to each round.  In the Western Desert, you could in theory have a German owned Soviet manufactured 7.62mm Field Gun rebored to 75mm, firing German ammunition. :banghead:

Quote from: rickshaw on April 28, 2023, 12:10:30 AMActually, it is much easier to create new rounds of a near enough calibre than you appear to think.  During WWII, the Germans captured large numbers of Soviet weapons.  The 7.62mm field guns were supposedly a greater calibre than 75mm rounds but the Germans easily modified the rounds just by adding a larger driving ring initially and later reboring them to a smaller calibre gun tube and chamber in 75mm calibre.  When they adopted the Czech 47mm AT Gun, they just manufactured new ammunition for once the Czech supplies ran low.  The British remanufactured German 75mm HE rounds in 1942 when their own supplies of 75mm which was an American calibre rather than one of their own, ran low.  That involved removing in the fuzes and changing the driving rings and re-adding the fuzes to each round.  In the Western Desert, you could in theory have a German owned Soviet manufactured 7.62mm Field Gun rebored to 75mm, firing German ammunition. :banghead:

I thought 7.62mm was a rifle round not an artillery round  :-\

Gondor

Quote from: Gondor on April 28, 2023, 12:23:47 AM

Quote from: rickshaw on April 28, 2023, 12:10:30 AMActually, it is much easier to create new rounds of a near enough calibre than you appear to think.  During WWII, the Germans captured large numbers of Soviet weapons.  The 7.62mm field guns were supposedly a greater calibre than 75mm rounds but the Germans easily modified the rounds just by adding a larger driving ring initially and later reboring them to a smaller calibre gun tube and chamber in 75mm calibre.  When they adopted the Czech 47mm AT Gun, they just manufactured new ammunition for once the Czech supplies ran low.  The British remanufactured German 75mm HE rounds in 1942 when their own supplies of 75mm which was an American calibre rather than one of their own, ran low.  That involved removing in the fuzes and changing the driving rings and re-adding the fuzes to each round.  In the Western Desert, you could in theory have a German owned Soviet manufactured 7.62mm Field Gun rebored to 75mm, firing German ammunition. :banghead:

I thought 7.62mm was a rifle round not an artillery round  :-\

Gondor

Oops!  Decimal place in the wrong spot.  Now corrected!   :banghead:

Quote from: rickshaw on April 28, 2023, 12:10:30 AM

Quote from: Jakko on April 27, 2023, 10:48:44 AM

Quote from: rickshaw on April 27, 2023, 03:48:17 AMInterestingly, the Soviets used to round certain calibres one way or the other to differentiate between the weapons that used those rounds, so 105mm rockets became 107mm supposedly,  Apparently, Stalin ordered them to prevent foulups in the logistic system. :banghead:

The USA and the UK did much the same at times. The British 77 mm gun (as used in the Comet cruiser tank) used the same projectiles as the 17-pounder, which was 3″ = 76 mm calibre, but deliberately designated 1 mm larger to prevent soldiers and logistics systems confusing the two. Same with the American 106 mm recoilless rifle M40, which fired 105 mm rounds but of a different type than the 105 mm RCL M27, so to avoid problems they again changed what the calibre was called rather than what it actually was.

This contrasts with things like the German 77 mm field guns from the First World War, which were actual 77 mm calibre. It was deliberately chosen because the French had 75 mm guns, so in case of a war they wouldn't be able to adapt German guns to use French ammo, but the Germans would be able to bore out captured French guns.

Actually, it is much easier to create new rounds of a near enough calibre than you appear to think.  During WWII, the Germans captured large numbers of Soviet weapons.  The 76.2mm field guns were supposedly a greater calibre than 75mm rounds but the Germans easily modified the rounds just by adding a larger driving ring initially and later reboring them to a smaller calibre gun tube and chamber in 75mm calibre.  When they adopted the Czech 47mm AT Gun, they just manufactured new ammunition for once the Czech supplies ran low.  The British remanufactured German 75mm HE rounds in 1942 when their own supplies of 75mm which was an American calibre rather than one of their own, ran low.  That involved removing in the fuzes and changing the driving rings and re-adding the fuzes to each round.  In the Western Desert, you could in theory have a German owned Soviet manufactured 7.62mm Field Gun rebored to 75mm, firing German ammunition. :banghead:

Rickshaw mate you don't have to theorize at all ..the Germans did exactly that in the Weatern Desert .
The Germans also mounted the F22 M1936 76.2mm gun on a 5ton halftrack called Diana ..I think it was built by Alket and used in the Western Desert.

Quote from: rickshaw on April 28, 2023, 12:10:30 AMActually, it is much easier to create new rounds of a near enough calibre than you appear to think.

It's not what I appear to think, I merely mentioned the reason the Germans adopted 77 mm field guns in the late 19th/early 20th century. Whether or not it would have worked as intended or not, I don't know, because I'm not aware of whether anyone ever actually tried it. The French probably never had any need to, anyway.

Quote from: rickshaw on April 28, 2023, 12:10:30 AMWhen they adopted the Czech 47mm AT Gun, they just manufactured new ammunition for once the Czech supplies ran low. The British remanufactured German 75mm HE rounds in 1942 when their own supplies of 75mm which was an American calibre rather than one of their own, ran low.

These are not examples of changing the calibre, though :)

Last bit of work on the M70A2's hull that I forgot to include yesterday:

IMG_5659.jpeg

I made M1 Abrams-style side skirts from plastic card, with strip behind part of them to give extra thickness to the front ones that would have had "special armor" as the Americans call(ed) the Chobham-derived armour of the M1 Abrams:

M1 Abrams Special Armor Locations.jpeg

The front skirt plates are thicker than the rear ones because of this:

M1 Abrams Special Armor skirts.jpeg

Which I thought would be a good fit for the M70A2 as well. The supports are L-shapes cut from Games Workshop sprues and with the outer faces filed square. These will be out of sight, so no need to make them look good or believable. The skirts were left loose until after painting, so I could fit the wheels and tracks. Two bits of square plastic rod under the sponsons create location points so it was easy to position the skirts correctly later on.

Talking of tracks, I decided to replace the kit's soft-plastic tracks by separate-link ones, and because I prefer workable track over non-, I bought this Trumpeter set:

IMG_5628.jpeg

These are T156 tracks for the early models of M1 Abrams. Not historically correct for the MBT 70, but I think they look cool and felt they could plausibly have been developed for the M70, so I went with them. Assembly is fairly easy:

IMG_5632.jpeg

On the left the basic link part, next to that a link with side plates added, to replicate the hole that's between the pins, and then three links with end connectors. These are spaced correctly on the sprue to slide them straight onto multiple links, but I found it difficult to do with more than two.

Putting a length together gives you:

IMG_5633.jpeg

There is no glue at all on these, so they remain completely workable, for easy installation after painting. With the side skirts, BTW, I don't bother building a complete track — the top run will be entirely hidden, so why waste effort and parts on that? I just built enough to go over the drive sprocket and idler so the ends disappear from sight when the skirts are on.

 :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Just that one pic of the tracks proves to me just why I don't normally build tank kits!  :banghead:

OK, I've got that 'Berlin Brigade' Chally 2 on the way, but that may be the only one.

Kit,  I build tank kits, and that set of photos gives me the shivers  :o ,  i normally just use the provided tacks in Tamiya kits, and ( thank Bob) most wargames kits have the tracks and roadwheels cast as a single entity   :thumbsup:

Jakko   good on you for having the patience and drive to be able to do that  :thumbsup:   im not sure id have the patience.

Quote from: PR19_Kit on April 28, 2023, 03:14:38 AMJust that one pic of the tracks proves to me just why I don't normally build tank kits!  :banghead:

Just buy ones with soft plastic tracks, you'll be fine :)

Quote from: Steel Penguin on April 28, 2023, 10:08:37 AMgood on you for having the patience and drive to be able to do that  :thumbsup:   im not sure id have the patience.

Most modellers, IMO, approach these kinds of tracks wrong. They build the whole model and then start on the tracks, perhaps putting it off as long as possible because of the work involved. You're much better off tackling the track in between doing other stuff: waiting for some glue to dry? Remove the parts from one or two track sprues and clean them up. Done some work on the turret? Put ten or so links together. Etc. That way you won't get bored out of your skull having to clean up and assemble two full tracks in one go.

What also helps is that I can make myself do dull tasks fairly well as long as there is a clear end in sight. OTOH, if I had to put this stuff together and someone would keep adding parts to the pile whenever it runs low ... I would probably end up bashing that person's face into a brick wall eventually ;)

That said, I still don't really want to do tracks that are more work than they need to be. The ones I put on my M4A3 (90 mm) (https://www.whatifmodellers.com/index.php?msg=994638), for example, are not a set I would buy again if I had a real choice, because they're just too much work for my taste. OTOH, the style of tracks where you slide end connectors onto links, like the ones I used here, I don't have too much problems with — unless they're a bother to clean up, of course. The fact that you endup with a workable track makes up for the effort in putting it together for me, because it means there are no problems installing it after painting — unlike hard plastic tracks that you have to glue together.

Kit you've brought the Berlin Brigade Challenger 2 ..would it be the Ryefield models version of it ?
I'm not going to say a thing about how many AM track sets I have ..I don't want to give anyone any health issues  :wacko:

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 28, 2023, 11:28:53 AMKit you've brought the Berlin Brigade Challenger 2 ..would it be the Ryefield models version of it ?

No, it's a Tamiya Chally 2 in the 'Desertised' version, and I'm building as if it had been around in the Berlin Brigade 'blocked camo' scheme, just for the hell of it.

It's a VERY slow build, as usual with many of mine, and the thread's still on here at https://www.whatifmodellers.com/index.php?topic=48561.15

The build starts at post #29.

Quote from: PR19_Kit on April 28, 2023, 11:59:22 AM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 28, 2023, 11:28:53 AMKit you've brought the Berlin Brigade Challenger 2 ..would it be the Ryefield models version of it ?

No, it's a Tamiya Chally 2 in the 'Desertised' version, and I'm building as if it had been around in the Berlin Brigade 'blocked camo' scheme, just for the hell of it.

It's a VERY slow build, as usual with many of mine, and the thread's still on here at https://www.whatifmodellers.com/index.php?topic=48561.15

The build starts at post #29.

Oh Womby did not lead you along the wrong path ..the Tamiya kit is a shake n bake kit..pretty near falls together and one piece tracks  ;D
Even though I wouldn't hesitate to build Ryefields one ..it does look like a beauty.

All these mods are looking ace. :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Some pretty nifty solder work as well on the light guards.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 28, 2023, 11:28:53 AMI'm not going to say a thing about how many AM track sets I have ..I don't want to give anyone any health issues  :wacko:

Good point, I will keep my mouth shut about my stash of those too, then ... Except to say: don't buy Bronco Sherman tracks.

Quote from: buzzbomb on April 28, 2023, 04:03:32 PMAll these mods are looking ace. :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Some pretty nifty solder work as well on the light guards.

Thanks. The soldering was not that great, if I'm honest — my skills in that area are somewhat lacking, but I managed to get the bits together. I mean, how hard can it really be to solder three wires? :) Well, you can see solder on the free ends of two wires, which was because the first attempt didn't come out too well, and I decided trying again with the clean ends would be better.

Quote from: Jakko on April 29, 2023, 01:59:08 AM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 28, 2023, 11:28:53 AMI'm not going to say a thing about how many AM track sets I have ..I don't want to give anyone any health issues  :wacko:

Good point, I will keep my mouth shut about my stash of those too, then ... Except to say: don't buy Bronco Sherman tracks.

Hahahaha 😆
Oh you poor sod ..wished I had known you yrs ago matey ..I could have warned ya about all Bronco AM tracks ..oh and Dragon Sherman tracks aswell .
Some of the hardest or stupidest tracks I've ever built..or tried to build are Bronco tracks..the amount of glue is minascule and that means the tracks won't stay together..I just hard glue em together..they still look good and a damn site easier to work with  :thumbsup:

How about Dragon Pz IV tracks?  I've got one in the stash with individual links.  Is it going to drive me mad(der)?

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:41:40 AMOh you poor sod ..wished I had known you yrs ago matey ..I could have warned ya about all Bronco AM tracks

I bought a Bronco Ram (https://www.scalemates.com/kits/bronco-cb35215-cruiser-tank-ram-mk-ii--1210909) when it had just been released. Looked in the box and saw the tracks, looked at the instructions on how to assemble them, and decided they looked far too fragile to build and far too much work to bother with. I sold them on and ordered a set of Panda Plastics (http://www.shermantracks.com/) tracks for it instead. Neither the model nor the tracks have been built yet, of course :) And looking at the new Gecko Ram Kangaroo and Badger, I kind of doubt it ever will be, at least if Gecko would be so kind as to also release the gun tank ... The Bronco Ram has a lot of problems.

A few years later, I needed a small number of T49 Sherman track links for a model built to replicate photographs of a real tank that had this some of type of link as spare track armour. The only viable option was Bronco, due to being both inexpensive and easily available locally (that is, without having to order from outside the EU). Putting four or five links together that didn't even need to be workable was enough trouble that I was glad I didn't have to do two full tracks.

Fast forward to last year, I decided I would give them another try for another Sherman-based kit that's currently a bit on hold. I cleaned up a few sprues worth of links but even that was so much bother that I ended up putting them back in the box and the box in the stash, digging out a set of Panda T54E1 tracks instead. At least those are easy to build, as these things go.

Quote from: zenrat on April 29, 2023, 05:56:31 AMHow about Dragon Pz IV tracks?  I've got one in the stash with individual links.  Is it going to drive me mad(der)?

Very long ago, I Dragon Panzer III tracks on this:

Leman Russ.jpeg

That's a Games Workshop Leman Russ (https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/astra-militarum-leman-russ-battle-tank-2023#) converted with parts from mainly an old Italeri Panzer IV and Dragon Panzer III tracks. No idea if your Panzer IV kit has similar tracks, as these are the type they put into the box 20–25 years ago, but they went together well enough.

Fred as a builder of over 40 Panzer IVs alone..no kidding on that ..I have used dozens of P/IV tracks .
Now the early tracks did need the odd bit of clean up here and there ...nothing to serious at all really.
Later Dragon released their Magic Tracks..some colour coded ..light  and dark gray..these are magic for sure..go together like a charm.
Oh the colour coding is just to identify left and right ..bloody good idea..
Freddy mate can ya tell me which Dragon P/IV kit ya have and tell ya what you in for ..ive pretty much all of them .

Jakko I honestly do feel for ya ...as a dedicated nutter of tanks for years, I'd built so many Sherman's that I got bored with em and I'd built a heap of brands..Tamiya..Bronco..Academy..AFV club and so on..oh Tasca..wow ..those are amazing.
And as you can imagine AM tracks galore..and in one way or another all early type Sherman tracks suck.
Their fiddly to put together..brittle when put together and in alot of occasions a waste of time dew to the fact that Sherman tracks are kept tight with as little sag as possible.
Easy 8 tracks can be easier to put together but that just depends who made em ..Dragons set is nice and pretty easy..just lack detail and I do like them over the plastic tracks as they tend to curve inwards on the drive sprockets..oh ive also got a quite weird Easy 8 build coming up at some point 😉
It sounds like you and I have both had the Bronco nightmare more than once with their Sherman based variants 😀

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 12:47:39 PMin one way or another all early type Sherman tracks suck.
Their fiddly to put together..brittle when put together

Fiddly, yes; brittle, not my experience. It varies a bit per manufacturer, but the Panda ones are pretty sturdy and the AFV Club and MiniArt ones not much less so — provided you get the AFV Club ones with flat blocks, not the rubber chevron type, because some of the end connectors come off too easily :(

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 12:47:39 PMa waste of time dew to the fact that Sherman tracks are kept tight with as little sag as possible.

The main added value for me is that the blocks don curve around the wheels like single-piece tracks usually do, and that I can still easily install them after painting. But I don't want to spend more on a set of tracks than on the model itself, so my choice is usually for plastic :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 12:47:39 PMEasy 8 tracks can be easier to put together but that just depends who made em ..

Not the ones by AFV Club. The end connectors are loose on every bloody link with those, rather than every so often like with their VVSS tracks.

Oh I should have been a little more clear..the Bronco Sherman tracks is what I ment about being brittle when ya try to handle em ..the connection points are very delicate.
I've made all of AFV clubs Sherman track sets ..block..rubber chevron..steel chevron and easy 8 ..multiple sets of the easy8 and its hit and miss with those..ive had sets which were great and others like ya said..freaking end connectors won't stay on at all..to fix that I used mini flat head pliers to gently squeeze the track pins to make them wider..that worked ..but mate ..the time is incredibly long and drawn out but when I want something like that..won't stop till I have it.
Tell ya there's only 2 companies plastic tracks I really like ..Tamiyas and Tascas ..the tracks are soft and look very good yet they also sit on the wheels and drive sprockets very nicely ..when it comes to Sherman's with the early suspension plastic tracks are great..Academys tracks are OK  but Italeris always seemed to be terrible..far to stiff .
I built a diorama for a mate who brought a Bronco Bailey Bridge set and it had 4 Sherman based vehicles in it...a Kangaroo..a M3 ARV..a M4A3 and a Priest ..all Italeri based models ..all tracks replaced ..2 with Friulmodel as these were sitting on rough ground and the other 2 with AFV club..these were on a road.
I had to modify all the drive sprockets to fit these tracks then cut off and widen the suspension units so would line up with the drive sprockets...oh all these models had already been built from his own pile .I think had to rip them all to bits as he was let's say ..crap at building models  ;D

Oh couple of weeks ago I had a great score..I got the AFV club M3/M5 suspension set and the track set for about €5 ..great score and very unexpected as I'd never seen these here before .
Still have no idea what I'm gonna do with em  ;D

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:03:27 PMthe Bronco Sherman tracks is what I ment about being brittle when ya try to handle em ..the connection points are very delicate.

Glad I never had the opportunity to find out firsthand ;)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:03:27 PMto fix that I used mini flat head pliers to gently squeeze the track pins to make them wider..that worked ..but mate ..the time is incredibly long and drawn out

Elite Models released a set of Diehl tracks for the M113 about 20, 25 years ago, which was later also reboxed by AFV Club. I had the original Elite release, and in that, the holes in the end connectors are slightly undersize. You could just force them over the track pins, but they would be stuck fast so the track hardly articulated, and in any case, you probably bent or broke half the pins anyway. The only way to build them was to drill out two holes per connector. Two connectors per track link. Something like 60–65 links per side. Something like 500 holes to drill out ... I was glad that job was done.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:03:27 PMI built a diorama for a mate who brought a Bronco Bailey Bridge set and it had 4 Sherman based vehicles in it.

That must have taken up more room than I have for my finished models ;)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:03:27 PMall these models had already been built from his own pile .I think had to rip them all to bits as he was let's say ..crap at building models  ;D

We all started somewhere :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 02:03:27 PMOh couple of weeks ago I had a great score..I got the AFV club M3/M5 suspension set and the track set for about €5 ..great score and very unexpected as I'd never seen these here before .
Still have no idea what I'm gonna do with em  ;D

Stick them on an Academy M3 to replace its clearly wrong suspension?

Back to the M70! The hull finished, I built the turret. (Well, I did those two at the same time, going back and forth between them, but narratively it works better if I show one first and then the other :)) My idea was that the turret would have "Special Armor", but that necessitates flat surfaces. Let me show why with another illustration from the declassified M1 Abrams report:

M1 Abrams turret side armour.jpeg

Chobham-type armour consists of a stack of relatively thin plates, fixed together so they can move under impact. This will not work properly if the plates are curved, like pre-1970s Western tank turrets almost invariably were, so since then they all got slab-sided ones. This does mean the M70A2 would have a turret from flat plates instead of the smooth curve of the MBT 70 ...

IMG_5586.jpeg

I first made some templates with thin card to work out the sizes of plastic card I needed to cut. The one for the right side needs a cut-out to accommodate the gunner's primary sight, as you can see once they're glued to the turret:

IMG_5588.jpeg

On the left I plated over the position for the guidance system for the MGM-51 missiles, as I was going to replace the 152 mm gun by a 120 mm. For anyone wanting to do something similar but retaining the original gun, you would need to keep the tracker there as well.

Then I just needed to cut some more pieces to fill the gaps:

IMG_5593.jpegIMG_5594.jpeg

The undercut at the front is so the turret clears the engine deck. Ideally, I would have just extended the whole turret front down to a point, but it wouldn't be able to rotate past about 4 o'clock that way. This is about the minimum that still works.

I then filled some gaps onboth sides with two-part epoxy putty:

IMG_5597.jpegIMG_5598.jpeg

Around the AAMG turret, I also added flat plates, though in retrospect, this would probably have been unlikely, as there is hardly any room for "Special Armor" there to begin with.

As you can see in the photo above, there is absolutely nothing inside that turret preventing you from looking into the rest of the model, which I consider a serious omission by Dragon. A piece of plastic card was therefore cut and bent to fit:

IMG_5600.jpeg

Also on the roof are blow-out panels modelled after the ones on the early versions of the M1 Abrams, in this case covering the autoloader instead of a simple ammunition rack. I had to file, putty and sand the roof flat to accommodate them, of course, but other than that they're just some bits of plastic card.

i didnt expect the Chobham !  but looking good with it  :thumbsup:    are you going for the plate being extra like with the StillBrew on Chieftain or full re build on the turret giving full thickness simaler to the M1 and Challenger?

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 12:47:39 PMFred as a builder of over 40 Panzer IVs alone..no kidding on that ..I have used dozens of P/IV tracks .
Now the early tracks did need the odd bit of clean up here and there ...nothing to serious at all really.
Later Dragon released their Magic Tracks..some colour coded ..light  and dark gray..these are magic for sure..go together like a charm.
Oh the colour coding is just to identify left and right ..bloody good idea..
Freddy mate can ya tell me which Dragon P/IV kit ya have and tell ya what you in for ..ive pretty much all of them ...

Thanks mate.  Its at the bottom of one of my stash distribution boxes but i'm pretty sure its an Ausf D.
This one, but in a special boxing with some figures.  I think it has magic tracks.
(https://www.scalemates.com/products/img/3/3/6/108336-10244-pristine.jpg)

Quote from: Steel Penguin on April 30, 2023, 03:11:02 AMare you going for the plate being extra like with the StillBrew on Chieftain or full re build on the turret giving full thickness simaler to the M1 and Challenger?

This is meant to represent integral armour on a redesigned turret — keeping the basic shape, but adapted to fit Chobham-type armour on the front. That's why I went to plenty of trouble to ensure the plastic card bits blend into the moulded turret.

ahh i see, the latter option :thumbsup:   nice one  ;D

Quote from: zenrat on April 30, 2023, 05:46:35 AM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on April 29, 2023, 12:47:39 PMFred as a builder of over 40 Panzer IVs alone..no kidding on that ..I have used dozens of P/IV tracks .
Now the early tracks did need the odd bit of clean up here and there ...nothing to serious at all really.
Later Dragon released their Magic Tracks..some colour coded ..light  and dark gray..these are magic for sure..go together like a charm.
Oh the colour coding is just to identify left and right ..bloody good idea..
Freddy mate can ya tell me which Dragon P/IV kit ya have and tell ya what you in for ..ive pretty much all of them ...

Thanks mate.  Its at the bottom of one of my stash distribution boxes but i'm pretty sure its an Ausf D.
This one, but in a special boxing with some figures.  I think it has magic tracks.
(https://www.scalemates.com/products/img/3/3/6/108336-10244-pristine.jpg)

Mate that's a D for sure  :o ...yep I've had that version and it comes with either on sprue type tracks or the magic tracks depending on the age of the release of the kit ...either way it's still a pleasure to build ..oh plenty of spare parts to stuff into the parts box too. ;D

Jakko that turret is looking better than it ever did and with the inclusion of the 120mm gun its going to look even better. :thumbsup:
The MBT-70 always looked wrong with such a large turret and such a small gun ..lenght wise .
I'm pretty sure this is going to be one of the best MBT-70s seen .

After adding antislip to the upper parts of the turret, I also added an M1-style stowage bin on the left as wel as the boxes for spare smoke grenades, of the type also used on the M60A1 and -A3, as well as a tow cable from a Dragon M1 Abrams kit:

IMG_5615.jpeg

The bin and tow cable are only on the right, there is no room for a bin on the left and I only had the one cable in my spares box. The smoke grenade box is on both sides, though. I also added ribs from plastic strip inside the channel in front of the gunner's sight, to create a series of bullet deflectors.

I then built M1-style stowage racks on both sides of the turret as well:

IMG_5616.jpeg

I first drilled holes in the sides, bent brass rod into shape and built a rear bracket from some plastic card to hold them in. As this wanted to slip down, I had to hold it in place with Blu-Tack until the glue dried. After that, I needed to build reinforcements between the bars. On the M1 these are basically bits of sheet metal welded between the bars, thin edge outward, so I first tried to replicate that by drilling or punching holes in plastic card, but never managed to get all three spaced correctly, so I had to find another way.

Eventually, I hit upon the idea of wrapping a thin piece of masking tape around the bars, then flowing superglue into the gaps to create a membrane and filling the rest of the gap with putty once the glue hardened:

IMG_5692.jpeg

Worked well, IMHO :)

At the rear, I installed the kit's bustle rack:

IMG_5700.jpeg

However, as the kit represents a KPz 70, it had German-style antenna mountings there, which I replaced by scratchbuilt ones that replicate the M1 Abrams's type. They're really just a punched disc with a piece of rod on top and punched bolt heads around that, the whole thing set on a length of sprue sawed at an angle to fit the turret rear. The wind sensor is also based on that of the early types of M1, again scratchbuilt from rod, sprue and plastic card.

On top of the turret, the MBT 70 had two large vision devices, which Dragon provides (of course) but has left completely devoid of any internal details whatsoever. But if you look up photos of the real tank, they have very obvious stuff inside of them. A big problem there is that the viewers are actually vertical, with a mirror above them so light gets reflected into the viewers. I had great trouble thinking of a way to do this in scale, because it's just about impossible to get a good enough mirror that is also thin enough to replicate this.

Until I had a brainwave: you don't need a mirror on your model, you can just build the optic twice: once vertically and once horizontally at the back of the hood, then just put a piece of transparent plastic between them at the angle of the mirror:

IMG_5694.jpegIMG_5699.jpeg

the turret side bin and the optics are utterly inspired Jakko  :thumbsup:   the use of tape and then strengthen and fill is just genius, i had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle and glue against the bars, but that is far more elegant, and im going to steal it, unashamably 

Quote from: Steel Penguin on May 01, 2023, 02:41:15 AMthe turret side bin and the optics are utterly inspired Jakko  :thumbsup:   the use of tape and then strengthen and fill is just genius, i had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle and glue against the bars, but that is far more elegant, and im going to steal it, unashamably 

Second that.  Always looking out for good scratching tricks.
 :thumbsup:

Quote from: Steel Penguin on May 01, 2023, 02:41:15 AMthe turret side bin and the optics are utterly inspired Jakko  :thumbsup:   the use of tape and then strengthen and fill is just genius, i had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle and glue against the bars, but that is far more elegant, and im going to steal it, unashamably 

Totally agree with the above comment's. Both ideas will be used if and when I find the need to  :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Gondor

While I'll never ever build anything in 1:35, this is absolutely mind-bogglingly inspiring, and I'm drooling over each new post. Loving this!  :wub:

Quote from: Pellson on May 01, 2023, 05:19:48 AMWhile I'll never ever build anything in 1:35...

Not tempted by a Land Rover?  You could do stuff to one you would never be allowed to do IRL.

Quote from: zenrat on May 01, 2023, 05:37:11 AM

Quote from: Pellson on May 01, 2023, 05:19:48 AMWhile I'll never ever build anything in 1:35...

Not tempted by a Land Rover?  You could do stuff to one you would never be allowed to do IRL.

The things I do IRL are best experienced driving the car, and while the 1/35 scale certainly is bigger that my usual 1/72, I still fear I won't fit.. 

Still looking for a good Defender in 1/72, though. There are a few Series, but no flat fronters out there.  :(

Thanks, all :)

Quote from: Steel Penguin on May 01, 2023, 02:41:15 AMi had thought that you'd use a thin  piece of platic card and nibble a semi circle

That's what I tried at first, in various ways, and most of them would have worked if I had had only two bars to put a brace between (even then I got it wrong on about half the trial pieces I made), but getting all three semicircles spaces right just didn't want to happen. I suspect someone with better fabrication skills than I have, would have done it that way easily. The method I did use makes braces that are far too thick to use for, say, an accurate representation of the M1 Abrams's bins — but these are not that, so I can get away with a thicker piece :)

Dude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen  ;D
That idea for the frame was a bit of brilliant thinking mate and all in all the best way to do it ...making holes that small would be a real pain and if for going for scale it would make it even more of a pain 🙃.

Have a idea about your anti skid panels ..have a you used silica sand ? .
It's extremely fine sand which I've used for anti skid panels and it scales better than beach sand ..a small amount goes a long bloody way that's for sure..it's also known as paving sand in some places.
Not as cheap as beach sand tho  ;D

I hadn't thought of that, though I have considered sand for birdcages at some point — cheapness won out, though ;) However, I think that before I need antislip surfaces in future, I will buy a set of this (https://www.scalemates.com/kits/afv-club-ac35206-anti-slip-coating-stickers-vehicle-tank-aircraft-ship--546326). I didn't know it existed until a few weeks ago, but I saw somebody use it on a model on another forum, and it looks ideal — thin enough and a fine enough texture to be convincing, and no more messing about with glue or acrylic gel.

Yeah I forgot about that ..it's sticky ultra fine sand paper  ;D
I believe Ammo does a paint or something like that just for anti skid panels..I'll be doing some of this type of work soonish  ;)
Might get the sand cause getting either of those two here is not gonna happen.

Try Rustoleum spray can of Terra Cotta texture paint. It's just gritty enough for the anti slip coating. It comes out a brownish color but you can paint it whatever you need. I've used it on a couple of tank projects and looks just right.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 01, 2023, 11:27:32 AMDude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen  ;D

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)...  ;)

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article.  :thumbsup:

Quote from: Rick Lowe on May 02, 2023, 01:46:44 AM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 01, 2023, 11:27:32 AMDude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen  ;D

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)...  ;)

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article.  :thumbsup:

It's is indeed mate...get the juices flowing again it does .
  ;D
Part of me wants to do another one of these yet a bigger part don't 🙃  :wacko:

Quote from: Rick Lowe on May 02, 2023, 01:46:44 AM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 01, 2023, 11:27:32 AMDude this is rockin...great stuff and like my esteemed colleagues some of your ideas will be openly stolen  ;D

Thirded (or Fourthded, whatever)...  ;)

Always nice to see this sort of in-depth build article.  :thumbsup:

This is going great! Waiting to see more.

Excellent work, it's looking good.  :wub:  Interesting subject too.

Would wet 'n dry sandpaper work for the anti-skid panels?  It's generally thinner than 'proper' sandpaper and available in finer grades.  It might be a fair bit cheaper than the AFV Club stuff without the advantage of being self-adhesive.

In that case, let me continue with the gun mantlet ... The kit, of course, includes the normal MBT 70/KPz 70 cast mantlet, but again, I wanted it to look like it could be Chobham-armoured instead. More scratchbuilding, then. It took a bit of experimentation to work out the necessary shapes, but I arrived at these (partly assembled because I forgot to take a photo sooner):

IMG_5702.jpeg

The tube is a piece from a spool for thread or something (I don't quite recall) that my father turned to the right size for me on his lathe, the rest is simple plastic card. The tricky part was the hole in the front — that is, the two pieces on the right.

The way I did this was to draw two rectangles in Adobe Illustrator (use whichever vector graphics program you have available — Inkscape (https://inkscape.org) is a good one if you need it for no money, or are running Linux) so that they had the width of the mantlet, their height together was also that of the mantlet, and the line between the two was at the height of the point at the front. Then I drew a circle at the point where the tube was to go through it, with the same diameter as the outside of the tube. Here is a quick mock-up to illustrate this (not to scale or even proportions, I just drew it for this post):

Mantlet mockup 1.png

The next step was to subtract the circle from each of the two rectangles, using the "Minus Front" pathfinder operation:

Minus Front.png

You have to do that separately for each of the two rectangles, so copy the circle before doing this with the first rectangle, and then paste-in-place to get the circle back for the second one. That gets you something like this:

Mantlet mockup 2.png

Then all I needed to do was stretch each of the two rectangles separately so that their height became the actual length the plastic card needed to be:

Mantlet mockup 3.png

Next, I printed this out and pasted it to plastic card. When the glue had dried, I cut out around the outside to get the rectangular pieces you can see in the first photo. After that, I cut out the elliptical areas too to create the hole for the tube:

IMG_5703.jpeg

I could then assemble everything into the basic shape for the mantlet:

IMG_5704.jpeg

Note the reinforcements on the inside, which also help to keep things square. When the glue had dried, I used a half-round file to file out the hole in the front, to bevel its edge so that the tube will fit through — because, of course, now they're at an angle, the inside diameter is smaller than the outside that I cut as per the lines. That done, I could glue in the pipe. This required superglue with one of those applicator pens for impossible-to-glue plastics (I used Pattex Super Glue Plastics (https://www.pattex-adhesives.com.au/en/products/super-glues/superglues-plastics.html)), because the material was something I couldn't quite identify, but using superglue straight didn't hold very well.

Here is a comparison to the kit mantlet:

IMG_5714.jpeg

As you can see, I also added more details. On the right of the mantlet is a large piece of plastic tube as a shield over the gunner's telescope, with a smaller tube for the coaxial machine gun below it. On the left side are some bits of copper wire with thin tubing (the kind Tamiya kits sometimes give you for searchlight power cables etc.) over them to replicate the searchlight mounting points, which were copied from the kit part. The bolts on the front of the tube were made with hex punch-and-die set.

Quote from: Mossie on May 02, 2023, 10:16:56 AMWould wet 'n dry sandpaper work for the anti-skid panels?  It's generally thinner than 'proper' sandpaper and available in finer grades.  It might be a fair bit cheaper than the AFV Club stuff without the advantage of being self-adhesive.

It's used a lot for this purpose, yes, but the backing paper is a bit of a problem because it adds a fair amount of thickness. I've read of people removing the paper and then glueing the grit only to the model, but don't ask me how they manage that :)

Quote from: Jakko on May 02, 2023, 10:42:04 AM

Quote from: Mossie on May 02, 2023, 10:16:56 AMWould wet 'n dry sandpaper work for the anti-skid panels?  It's generally thinner than 'proper' sandpaper and available in finer grades.  It might be a fair bit cheaper than the AFV Club stuff without the advantage of being self-adhesive.

It's used a lot for this purpose, yes, but the backing paper is a bit of a problem because it adds a fair amount of thickness. I've read of people removing the paper and then glueing the grit only to the model, but don't ask me how they manage that :)

Dead right Jakko ...ive used 2000 grit sand paper..well every grade of sand paper to be honest..they all suffer the same issue..thickness.
Using the best sand paper I can get it the same as the stuff I get from any auto parts store...it's thicker than .25mm sheet plastic  and cutting out the right sizes is annoying to get right and the biggest problem is over time the paper will lift as the glue won't penetrate the paper dew to it ..well being wet and dry  ;D
I'd stick to texture paint or sand and glue.
I do like Kericks idea and well worth looking into that . :thumbsup:

Slick work on the new mantlet and top tip on getting a pattern worked up.

Also tried sandpaper for non-slip, it looks OK under paint, but as you have all already pointed out, it is the thickness and challenge in cutting/fitting/fixing. My go at it was long before all these new fangled textured paints and gizmo's existed and at the time was the "go to" option.

I've produced paint jobs on model cars which had the texture of sandpaper by getting the settings wrong on my airbrush (or having the paint thinnedness wrong).
No idea what I did wrong though.  Or how to reproduce it.
 :unsure:

That last bit is the problematic part — knowing how to do it again :) But a rough finish when airbrushing usually means the paint is drying too soon, before it hits the model, so you were probably spraying it with too little thinner, at too low a pressure, from too far away, or any combination of these.

Continuing with the gun mantlet, something went horribly wrong when I tried to install it ... I had glued a length of plastic tubing to the T-piece that the Dragon barrel normally attaches to, with the right inside diameter for the Tamiya 120 mm gun barrel I was going to use. Naturally, the turned bit of plastic I built into the mantlet has an inner diameter so it nicely fit over that plastic tube. However, the need to use that magic superglue pen also means the superglue dries much faster and gives very little time to get things just right. That all came together into this:

IMG_5718.jpeg

The mantlet wasn't on far enough and it was at a slight angle when seen from the front to boot :(

Luckily, I had left the T-piece loose, allowing me to use this fairly drastic solution:

IMG_5719.jpegIMG_5720.jpeg

A saw blade in my knife handle was small enough to slip behind the mantlet from below and saw through the T-piece, getting the mantlet loose. A bit of tidying up removed enough material that it would sit correctly against the turret, so I could then just glue the T-piece back together with model cement:

IMG_5721.jpeg

And add the gun barrel, of course. That's just straight from a Tamiya M1A1 kit; not sure I mentioned it anymore, but I had it spare because I had converted that to an M1 IP (the upgraded M1 with 105 mm gun) 20 years ago or so. There's a Dutch saying that translates as, "He who keeps something, has something" :)

You can see in these photos that I also added some other details to the turret, like front lifting rings. These are simply KPz 70 parts, glued in about the same location as they would be on the original turret.

More turret details I added include the smoke grenade launchers:

IMG_5725.jpegIMG_5724.jpeg

Tamiya parts from an old Chieftain model I had built but long ago broken up for parts (this is why there is paint on them), because American tanks from the 1970s and 80s used British-designed launchers. The bases behind them are from the same M1A1 kit as the barrel (because I had used an etched set on the M1 IP), with punched bolt heads, copper wire for the cabling, plastic L-profile for protective channels for the cables, etc. As this was going to be a tank in wartime, I decided to depict them loaded; you normally wouldn't see the grenades when they're loaded, really, but some American crews in the Gulf War double-loaded each tube, which meant half of the second grenade stuck out. I replicated this by drilling out the tubes and inserting some 2 mm plastic rod.

The numbers on the right front of the turret were shaved from a Tamiya sprue. They're there because M1 turrets have the same thing, though usually made by just "writing" the digits with welds. (If there's "-U" after it, the tank has uranium armour, BTW.)

Towards the rear, I added a simple jerrycan rack:

IMG_5722.jpeg

Just a plastic card shelf with upturned edges from some strip, and stays from strip as well.

M1 crews have (had?) a habit of attaching large ammo cans to the bustle rack to stow personal belongings in, and did so in the Gulf War too, so I did that too here:

IMG_5723.jpeg

Only three, of course, because the M70 had a three-man crew. The cans are from the AFV Club Cal.30/Cal.50/40mm Modern U.S. Ammunition Box & Ammunition Belt (https://www.scalemates.com/kits/afv-club-af35035-cal30-cal50-40mm--133798) set.

Good recovery  :thumbsup:

Cool.  :thumbsup:

The next fun bit: secondary armament. I had decided that the Americans wouldn't have wanted a 20 mm cannon, because well, Americans and 20 mm cannons don't seem to go well together IRL. It needs to be a good ol' fifty-cal they ain't gonna want it. However, holding a 1:35 scale M2 HB in place with some of the AA gun mounting parts from the kit, shows that weapon would be impossible to install properly. As you can see:

mbt-70_experimental_tank_083_of_136.jpeg
(source (https://www.primeportal.net/tanks/david_lueck/mbt-70_experimental_tank/index.php?Page=5))

... the gun elevates in a round thing, that the ammunition feed goes through — the only real way you can do that without either extensible ammo feeds, which would be a right pain to design and make IRL, or an ammo bin that elevates with the gun, which would make for a very limited supply. If you put an M2 HB in the mounting with its feedway in the rounded part, though, the back end of the gun sticks out of the back of the AA turret. Clearly, that won't do.

The only other option, really, is an M85 machine gun, the one that was used in the commander's cupola of the M60 series and in the original LVTP-7 turret. The downside of that, is that you can't buy one in this scale, to the best of my knowledge — or at least, you couldn't four years ago, maybe there's a 3D printed one available now?

IMG_5728.jpegIMG_5729.jpegIMG_5730.jpegIMG_5731.jpeg

More plastic card to the rescue! The barrel is from an Italeri (ex-ESCI) M60A1 kit, the rest is scratchbuilt from photographs of the gun and drawings in its tech manual (https://books.google.com/books/about/Operator_s_Manual.html?id=DTwYAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y).

Jakko I have some news on this matter which will probably annoy you now 🙂
The M2 HB .50 cal machine would fit ..with some not to serious mods into the spot where that RH202 cannon used to sit.
The ammo feeding issues could be sorted using a flexible feed belt which is super flexible and can be twisted in quite a few cockeyed angles and still work...also the M2 can be feed from the left or right sides when the conversion is done ..so your choices are not limited..feeding the gun from a magazine under it would be simple are that's how the 202 was fed and when you rip out all the 20mm gubbins you'd end up with a nice amount of space to play with.
IRL the US has no problems with the 20mm cannon..they just prefer it had 6 barrels  ;D
Remember they did have a few aircraft armed with 20mm ..the AH1 Skyraider comes to mind first ..one of my favs  ;D

The US likes the .50 cal because we have so many of them! In Baghdad in '03 it was like a forest of gun barrels!

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 12:24:19 PMI have some news on this matter which will probably annoy you now 🙂

No, it won't :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 12:24:19 PMThe M2 HB .50 cal machine would fit ..with some not to serious mods into the spot where that RH202 cannon used to sit.
The ammo feeding issues could be sorted using a flexible feed belt which is super flexible and can be twisted in quite a few cockeyed angles and still work...

I know, I considered that too :) But keeping the original mounting, there isn't room to have the feed chute go through the trunnions — it would have to be in front of them, meaning an even longer chute is necessary in order to allow the gun to elevate. Remember that the whole mounting moves up and down to deploy and stow it.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 12:24:19 PMfeeding the gun from a magazine under it would be simple are that's how the 202 was fed

Sorry, but it is a dual-feed weapon that can take two belts, and that's how it was set up in the MBT 70: one belt through a chute through each trunnion.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 12:24:19 PMIRL the US has no problems with the 20mm cannon..they just prefer it had 6 barrels  ;D
Remember they did have a few aircraft armed with 20mm ..the AH1 Skyraider comes to mind first ..one of my favs  ;D

That was mostly the US Navy and US Air Force, though :)  The US Army had some, but only the M114A2 comes to mind right now as a production vehicle equipped with it in service.

Quote from: kerick on May 04, 2023, 12:53:39 PMThe US likes the .50 cal because we have so many of them!

That was actually the reason why the M1 Abrams has an M2 HB on the commander's cupola: the US Congress had imposed strict budget restrictions, because the MBT 70 and its cost-cut XM803 version both went wildly over, so after some other ideas were floated, the M1 got the M2 because that was essentially free due to so many being in stock already. One of the options that was strongly considered was a 40 mm automatic grenade launcher, but that would have cost money.

Also, there was the M2/M3 Bradley working with the Abrams tanks so their 25mm gun would fill the need for a Mk19 type of weapon. Today however, it would probably not be expensive to mount some Abrams with a Mk19. An interesting option for a whiffed Abrams......

Kerick mate the US is upgrading its entire M3 fleet with a new 30mm cannon...there's already Bradley's in service with the 30mm cannon installed .

Jakko considering the mods the US were going to do to the MBT-70 as it's wasn't meeting their needs ripping out the 202 and installing a .50 instead wouldn't have worried them ...if you consider the amount of money the US military spend on things which go nowhere they wouldn't have hesitated to do this conversion.
With the amount of things that have been done with the 50cal this would have been a rather simple conversion to do to this tank.

Oh you forgot the M163 Vulcan AA system  :thumbsup:

Well, the British weren't too keen on 20mm's on their tanks, either.

The Centurion Mk.1 & Mk.2 had a 20mm Polsten coaxial but from the Mk.3 they had Besa 7.92mm machine guns & .30cal/7.62mm Brownings from the Mk.5 on.

The Chieftain was armed with 7.62mm L8 coaxial & L37 cupola mounted machine guns (both L7/FN MAG developments), as did the Challengers.

Most weapons on tanks are not used for AA work more often than otherwise, & 20mm was seen as over-kill for most of their roles & limited the amount of ammunition that could be carried; for the British the same could be said of the .50cal.

Very true ...for yrs the only reason for the commanders machine gun was for something it didn't do anymore.
Fact russia was the only country that made their  gun mounts have the built in ability to engage aircraft since WW2 and still do .
All their turret mounted 50s will elevate to well over 60° just for that purpose.

I do like the L7/ FN MAG alot..it's heavy compared to what we normally used but it's range and accuracy was always welcomed 😄..ahhhh good memories 😊

Quote from: kerick on May 04, 2023, 03:01:57 PMToday however, it would probably not be expensive to mount some Abrams with a Mk19. An interesting option for a whiffed Abrams......

Good idea :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 09:41:43 PMif you consider the amount of money the US military spend on things which go nowhere they wouldn't have hesitated to do this conversion.

True, and since in this model's universe, the MBT 70 apparently didn't cost so much that the plug was pulled ...

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 04, 2023, 09:41:43 PMOh you forgot the M163 Vulcan AA system  :thumbsup:

I was referring to single-barrel 20 mm guns, though I should probably have mentioned that explicitly, yes :)

Quote from: Old Wombat on May 05, 2023, 12:45:53 AMWell, the British weren't too keen on 20mm's on their tanks, either.

The Centurion Mk.1 & Mk.2 had a 20mm Polsten coaxial but from the Mk.3 they had Besa 7.92mm machine guns & .30cal/7.62mm Brownings from the Mk.5 on.

The difference there, though, is that they felt a 20 mm coaxial gun would be good to have, while on the MBT 70, it was primarily an anti-aircraft weapon. Likely because of the already very limited effectiveness of anything smaller in the Second World War, let alone against 1970s jets.

France tried a coaxial 20 mm cannon in the AMX 30, with enough elevation to use it against aircraft that weren't too close as well, but also dropped it after a while in favour of a more traditional rifle-calibre machine gun.

Ahhh but 20mm is 20mm matey no matter what it comes out off..you know there's 20mm rifles out there now firing the same rds as the Vulcan ? .
I know the Vulcan has been in more US military aircraft than any other 20mm caliber cannons and now ya got me trying to think of the aircraft with single barrel multiple mountings ya bugga  ;D
OK I know the FJ Fury..Skyhawk..Skyraider..F8 crusader and A7 Corsair..can't think of anything semi modern..

Most jets post-Korea and before the M61 came out in the mid-60s, I think? And the US Navy liked single guns better than the Air Force did, I'd say.

1959 was when the M61 came into the world and I'm pretty sure the first plane it was tried in was the F104 Starfigther and I think it tried or did shoot itself down too  ;D
Out of all the weapons I've used or played with ive never had a go with one of these ..very doubtful it will happen now  ;D  :lol:

The gun the F-11 Tiger shot itself down with was a 20mm Colt Mk 12 Autocannon.

Didn't an F-8 do a similar thing too? They had Mk 12s as well.

Wow ! This is amazing work !

Thanks :)

With the machine gun done, its mounting also needed a small amount of work. First of all, I needed to build a cradle for the gun, because the M85 would not be able to fit into that for the Rh 202. All that took was some bits of plastic strip and stuff:

IMG_5752.jpeg

As you can see, I also added missing things inside the AA turret, all per photos of KPz 70 prototypes in German museums, and reduced the opening in the front. Instead of just filling the existing opening part of the way, I cut out a larger section and put in a rectangular piece of plastic card with a notch cut in it for the barrel.

Dragon completely skipped the interior of the AA turret. The actual gun mounting is there, but pretty much nothing else. Because of the open top, though, you can see very clearly that there's nothing in it, so what can you do except scratchbuild the rest?

IMG_5754.jpeg

The grey thing is the ammo bin for the M85. It comes from the interior parts of a Trumpeter Cadillac-Gage Commando kit, that I had built with the hatches closed so it was spare. I scribed a line across the top and added some plastic card bits to make it look like two bins of the right depth for .50 calibre rounds. The two chutes are plastic strip that I heated and bent, then glued more pieces of smaller strip on to replicate the patterns you see on these chutes in the real world.

The idea here, BTW, is that the chute on the left side of the gun is the belt feed from one side of the container while the one on the right is to return spent casings to the other side of it — I don't think you'd want the area under the turret to be full of spent casings. The Rh 202 fed from both sides and ejected the empty casings I-don't-know-where :)

In addition to the chutes, the gun mount needed a lot more detail:

IMG_5772.jpegIMG_5771.jpeg

Here's the turret, without the gun mounting, dropped into the main turret to show how it fits:

IMG_5774.jpeg

You do realise the M85 is a god-awful HMG?  It was considered so bad that it was often removed from vehicle turrets and replaced by M2s where ever possible by vehicle crews.

In a remote mounting mate it might be OK as you don't have to reload the bloody thing from inside of a midget turret ...though one of the biggest issues I could see is the different ammo belts/links used between the M85 and the M2 .
Those links where the M15 push through type and always had feed problems...jams happened quite alot because of these links.

Quote from: rickshaw on May 07, 2023, 12:05:07 AMYou do realise the M85 is a god-awful HMG?

I know :) But the US persevered with it well into the 1970s (the LVTP-7 comes to mind) and as I explained before, it's the only American gun that fits the AA turret without a major redesign of the whole mounting. Consider this an improved M85A1 that doesn't jam quite as often ;)

Well I'd this version called the M85A1 was converted to run the M2s M9 links then I think your on to something mate 😉 👍

That would not be possible, though ... Browning-style weapons withdraw the round rearwards out of the belt and then shove it forward into the chamber (because the mechanism was designed for cloth belts) while more modern weapons shove the round forward out of the belt directly into the chamber. Using Browning-style links in a forward-shoving gun leads to an immediate jam every time it tries to chamber a round, and there is usually no way to adapt the gun to pull it out to the rear without a complete redesign in order to lengthen the receiver so there is enough room to do that. The M85 may have been a poorly functioning weapon, but I doubt just using Browning-style belts and associated redesign would have fixed that.

If they were going to tinker with the design it anyway to improve it, they would have been better off making it work properly as it was now. Real-world example where that was done: the British L85 rifle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WtOOLh_F8I&list=PL9e3UCcU00TTKZGYyt7empeySNqh-xJWb). By all accounts, the L85A2 improved the weapon enough that it became not great but at least didn't suck anymore — and most of the improvements there were things that should have been implemented in the 1980s already by testing it some more than they did, and having actual firearms people work on it. Which is basically what H&K did for the A2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js4d8c7KzCQ&list=PL9e3UCcU00TTKZGYyt7empeySNqh-xJWb&index=6). Anything mechanical can eventually be improved far enough that it works as it should — the question is if it's considered to be worth the time and effort :) And whether it's still recognisable as what you started with, of course ...

Mate ...the M85 and the M2 are both Browning designed weapons and they both use disintegrating metal links .
The problem with the 85 was how small it was made to fit into armour.
They M85 had continuous feed problems because of that feed design and they were never over come ..as Rickshaw mentioned about the dumping of it by its crews and mounting a M2 on the commanders turret.
The thing was hated by all who had to use it..you said about the LVPT7 ..yep it was there but it was gone on the AAVP7 ..it was also tried on the XM1 Abrams prototype..then it was dumped for the M2.
I can't figure out why you want to stick with the original mounting which was for a entirely different gun ..ok in model building world it does make life a bit easier  :thumbsup: but in the RW half that mount would have gone byebye in favor of a system designed for the weapon it's now intended to use.
In a good way I'm glad the MBT-70 failed to meet both countries requirements because now we have the M1 and the Leo2  ;D

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 01:12:09 PMMate ...the M85 and the M2 are both Browning designed weapons

Browning was long dead when the M85 was designed. If you meant to say that the M85 uses a Browning-type mechanism, then you may be right (I never looked into it closely enough to tell) but my point stands that you can't easily convert it to using the older type of belt links because there's no room in the receiver.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 01:12:09 PMThe problem with the 85 was how small it was made to fit into armour.

I don't recall claiming it wasn't :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 01:12:09 PMThey M85 had continuous feed problems because of that feed design and they were never over come ..as Rickshaw mentioned about the dumping of it by its crews and mounting a M2 on the commanders turret.

Please see the part of my previous message about all mechanical problems being solvable if there's the will and the money to do so :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 01:12:09 PMI can't figure out why you want to stick with the original mounting which was for a entirely different gun ..ok in model building world it does make life a bit easier  :thumbsup: but in the RW half that mount would have gone byebye in favor of a system designed for the weapon it's now intended to use.

Probably, yes. I have no idea why I kept it, but it's quite likely that one of the reasons was that it's easier to detail an existing mounting than to build something believable from scratch.

What I find odd is that you ask this question at all on a forum that claims to be about what-if models when in fact a lot of it is pure fantasy "what happens if I stick these unrelated bits together because they look cool?" type of models ;)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 01:12:09 PMIn a good way I'm glad the MBT-70 failed to meet both countries requirements because now we have the M1 and the Leo2  ;D

And then I wouldn't have had these far nicer looking tracks to stick onto this model :)

In answer to your question about real world and the world of wiffery alot of builders here still work on the principles of real world applications.
Yeah it's a what if to the point of could it have actually be built.
I'm an engineer and the annoying thing for me is that..if I was going to build it how and what would I use to build it.
Like you using the M85 dew to space and its a good idea..my freaking annoying mind works on how do I get an entire M2 on there...modify the turret ..yep let's do that 🙃
OK one M2 is good ..so 2 would be better  ;D..it's a bloody nightmare bud .
Now as for its name ..it's just one of those things..yep General Electric made the M85 but cause it uses a .50cal round and it's a HMG it's referred to as a Browning..even tho it ain't.. hell I've used M2s made in Belgium..Israel..Japan and Singapore..there everywhere matey  ;D
Don't get me wrong I do like your mount as you said it's kinda so you don't have to scratch build a new one..looking close on what you've built dude it looks like ya have scratch built most of it  :lol:
Bloody nice work to 😁🤘

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 09:31:32 PMLike you using the M85 dew to space and its a good idea..my freaking annoying mind works on how do I get an entire M2 on there...modify the turret ..yep let's do that 🙃
OK one M2 is good ..so 2 would be better  ;D..it's a bloody nightmare bud .

It wouldn't be that hard to get an M2 in there, but would require either a completely new mount or have the existing one modified so the trunnions are further forward. Two side by side is probably also doable, but you'd have to wonder if this is believable, IMHO — I doubt tank designers in the 1970s would want to return to the state of affairs of the medium tank M2 :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 09:31:32 PMNow as for its name ..it's just one of those things..yep General Electric made the M85 but cause it uses a .50cal round and it's a HMG it's referred to as a Browning..even tho it ain't..

Never heard it called that, but then again, knowing people it's not a stretch of the imagination ... any tablet is an iPad, so any machine gun firing 12.7×99 mm rounds can well be a Browning to a lot of soldiers.

BTW, because I wanted to know, I looked up the M85 in Edward Ezell's Small Arms of the World and its mechanism definitely isn't Browning-derived in any way :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 07, 2023, 09:31:32 PMhell I've used M2s made in Belgium..Israel..Japan and Singapore..there everywhere matey  ;D

Of course, "Browning" refers to the designer and not the manufacturer :)

Okay, last bits to build ... The Tamiya M1A1 kit I got the barrel from also came with a track-width mine plow (TWMP) that I hadn't used on it, and I thought, why not on the M70A2? Since I'm going all-out here anyway ...

Of course, it doesn't fit the tank, because the TWMP's basic frame that attaches to the hull is designed for the M1's bow, and the MBT 70's was both steeper and slightly narrower. After looking for ways to make it fit anyway, I reached the conclusion that the only way to do it was to build a copy of it in plastic card and strip:

IMG_5709.jpeg

The tan part is of course the Tamiya original for the M1 hull, with my version in white plastic on the hull.

And with the winding mechanisms in place and the box between them:

IMG_5717.jpeg

The rest was built straight from the box:

IMG_5716.jpeg

Though I left the arms with the ploughs loose until after painting, else it would be a nightmare to get paint everywhere it should.

One handy thing here is that the MBT 70 had hydropneumatic suspension, so I could realistically attach the plough even though I had built the suspension so the hull sits level, rather than being pulled down at the front by the weight of the plough, as an M1 would be.

Funny you mention a M2 ..or the porcupine if you'd like  ;D
I scratch built one donkeys yrs ago for a customer starting with a Tamiya M3 lower hull ..I had to buy a set of Academys machine guns cause I freaking ran out of .30 cals ..its quite a easy build really ..just the 2000 rivets you have to put on saps the brain I can tell ya.

I'm pretty sure the M85 was full of annoyances cause it's was designed for only one real purpose with its own special ammo ..so no ammo commonality there without stripping belts..been there ..time consuming but not with 50 cal..5.56.
Oh if ya want some of the experiments done to US armour just go net hunting ..I used to have a pretty good collection of books on weird armour but those are history now ..im still thinking of a prototype commanders turret which made for a M26 with 2 50 cals ..one on each side of the turret ..it did look pretty cool 😎

Now to model stuff...liking the mine plow mate..a very nice addition to the looks department.
I do like something with makes something big look bigger  :thumbsup:

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 02:21:14 AMI scratch built one donkeys yrs ago for a customer starting with a Tamiya M3 lower hull ..I had to buy a set of Academys machine guns cause I freaking ran out of .30 cals ..its quite a easy build really ..just the 2000 rivets you have to put on saps the brain I can tell ya.

Rivets are one of those things I definitely like to add only in moderation ... Even if I do have some RP Toolz domed punches especially for this purpose :) I've been thinking of buying the Vargas Models medium tank M2A1 (https://vargas-lg.myshopify.com/products/copy-of-1-35-bob-semple-tank), though. Would fit nicely in my modest collection of M3s and M4s :)

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 02:21:14 AMI'm pretty sure the M85 was full of annoyances cause it's was designed for only one real purpose with its own special ammo ..so no ammo commonality there without stripping belts..been there ..time consuming but not with 50 cal..5.56.

That seems to have been one of the main complaints, as far as I can tell. The other appears to have been that ejected links could too easily jam the mechanism, which sounds like something that should be solvable by better controlling its movement inside the gun.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 02:21:14 AMim still thinking of a prototype commanders turret which made for a M26 with 2 50 cals ..one on each side of the turret ..it did look pretty cool 😎

They trialled that on M4s as well, as I recall. One of the more extreme what-ifs I've been thinking of is kind of the ultimate Sherman: an M4A6 (lengthened "composite" hull with cast glacis but otherwise welded, fitted with a radial diesel engine) with torsion bar suspension (trial IRL on an M4A2 hull), 76 mm turret (the real M4A6 had 75 mm) or possibly an M26 turret (again :)) and that cupola. Possibly also a welded rather than cast final drive housing.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 02:21:14 AMNow to model stuff...liking the mine plow mate..a very nice addition to the looks department.
I do like something with makes something big look bigger  :thumbsup:

You'll be disappointed then that I left off the washing machine on the hull rear, on the principle that it's almost ubiquitous on models of the M1 but appears in almost no photos of real M1s in the Gulf War — the only ones I've found have been on tanks in Saudi ports rather than in the field.

Oh do yourself a massive favor..buy that M2 ..those rivets mate just won't seem to end and it will save you hours of measurements and hours of mounting rivets  ;D

Now for some bad news..ish....apart from the diesel rotary engine pretty much everything you want for you Sherman wiff has been done in RL ..the good news tho these were spread over multiple vehicles and you want to do them all into one ? ..that would be nuts mate and of course that means perfect for here 👌 👍  ;D
Kinda reminds me to do some work on my Sherman wiffy.
You'll find that the M1 without the aircon was just the M1..the machines you see pics of at the docks are M1A1s ..those are what went into combat...the M1s were then removed from country and I think they were then given to the NG and Marines maybe ..but the Marines didn't have them in the gulf ..they were still using M60s with RISE ..I know I saw M60s there without any extra armour which were Marine tanks which we didn't think much of TBH..we were busy with other stuff 😉

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 12:53:35 PMOh do yourself a massive favor..buy that M2 ..those rivets mate just won't seem to end and it will save you hours of measurements and hours of mounting rivets  ;D

I definitely don't have any desire to scratchbuild an M2 — far too few M3/M4 bits will actually be usable on it for that to be viable, IMHO.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 12:53:35 PMNow for some bad news..ish....apart from the diesel rotary engine pretty much everything you want for you Sherman wiff has been done in RL ..

I think I said that already :) That's the whole point: what if they had gone through with all those upgrades to produce an ultimate Sherman? It would probably really only take a Hobby Boss M26 kit for the suspension and turret plus an Asuka M4A4 lower and upper hull plus some big-hatch M4A1 hull for the glacis, as well as some scratchbuilding for things like the engine deck.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 12:53:35 PMYou'll find that the M1 without the aircon was just the M1..the machines you see pics of at the docks are M1A1s ..those are what went into combat...

I know, and the washing machine is not an aircon but an APU :) My point was that you see that thing on about 99% of all models of M1A1s in the Gulf War, but on about 0% of real M1A1s there — which is why it also isn't on my M70A2 model.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 08, 2023, 12:53:35 PMthe Marines didn't have them in the gulf ..they were still using M60s with RISE ..I know I saw M60s there without any extra armour which were Marine tanks which we didn't think much of TBH..we were busy with other stuff 😉

I thought only the USAF and the Egyptian Army used M60A3s in Saudi Arabia? Oh, and five from the 197th Infantry Brigade, it turns out when I look through a book. The USMC called its M60A1s with ERA, M60A1+, BTW.

Let's have an overview of most of the bits of the complete tank:

IMG_5776.jpeg

The wheels are missing, because they're still on the sprues for ease of painting. After putting a coat of primer over the whole model, because of all the different shades and materials, I sprayed the undersides and insides green:

IMG_5793.jpeg

Followed by a coat of US Gulf War sand over the rest of the model:

IMG_5797.jpeg

The green is because these tanks would have been resprayed sand especially for the Gulf War, unlike most current sand-coloured American tanks that came from the factory or refurbishing centre in that colour.

... and there, the whole thing got stuck for a couple of years ...

My virtual computer pen, just ran out of virtual ink ticking all the boxes on this build

Excellent, Excellent work  :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Thanks :)

Hang on, I forgot one thing I also built before the whole project stalled:

IMG_5927.jpeg

From left to right: commander, gunner and driver. All three figures come from this Master Box set (https://www.mbltd.info/figures/1-35-scale/modern-wars-era/35131.html):

35131_7.jpg

Though these figures are intended for Afghanistan, something most modern armour modellers seem not to know about the 1991 Gulf War, is that American tank crews didn't wear BDUs and PASGT vests during the actual Desert Storm. Just like they tend to stick the hated APU to M1A1s, almost all of them put tank crews in regular uniforms in the tank's hatches. Which is correct for most of Desert Shield, but not long before the Coalition's ground offensive started, tank crews got brand-new nomex tank coveralls and thin armour vests — of the types that were still in use 10–20 years later in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For the driver, the set supplies two different right arms: one as here, the other as in the box-top illustration. I carved off the pistol holster and straps on two of the three, because that seems to have not been very commonly worn in 1991, leaving it just for the commander, and replaced the heads by Hornet ones as well as adding cables to the helmets using stretched sprue and some plastic card for the clip that takes the hanging cable's weight. The cables for the commander and driver just end around their knees because these two will be in their hatches, while the gunner's ends at the plug that connects it to the longer cable that goes into the intercom box inside the tank. These kinds of details were made rather easier to get right than usual by the fact I own this:

IMG_5814.jpeg

:)

Now I do wonder if one morning a tanker woke up to find his bone dome missing 🤔 😅
Very nice score Jak and not one ya come across every day for sure 👍

Your Sherman idea does sound very interesting and it's a cool idea to..love me a mutant tank 😉
I've got a diorama in building with a very mutant Sherman...i cheated and used a entire M26 lower hull with a M4A4E8 upper hull..it's a Hobbyboss M26 and it's tracks are far to narrow so AM tracks are a must.
I finally found a use for my Verlinden M51 conversion set ..had that turret for yrs..typical resin gun though...badly bent.

Good idea on the green paint under the fenders and behind the wheels. Plus IIRC didn't most forward deployed people wear NBC gear most of the time? One of the reasons they waited to invade, besides logistics, was cooler weather for the soldiers wearing NBC suits.

Nice work on this, been fun scrolling through the journey so far.

And idea when/if it will make the trip off the Shelf'o'Doom and back onto the bench?

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 09, 2023, 02:41:37 PMNow I do wonder if one morning a tanker woke up to find his bone dome missing 🤔 😅
Very nice score Jak and not one ya come across every day for sure 👍

It's actually a Dutch Army DH-132AS/SV helmet (AFAIK the American ones are just "DH-132" but I've never seen one up close) that I bought with the normal Dutch leather cover over 20 years ago, but a few years back I found the hard shell sold separately at a surplus store web site, so I ordered it immediately — and it even fits!

IMG_9713.JPG

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 09, 2023, 02:41:37 PMI've got a diorama in building with a very mutant Sherman...i cheated and used a entire M26 lower hull with a M4A4E8 upper hull..it's a Hobbyboss M26 and it's tracks are far to narrow so AM tracks are a must.

Narrow tracks may actually be good for the torsion-bar Sherman — the suspension they tested on an M4A2 came from the T20, not the T26, and the T26 already had wider tracks (and wheels) than the T25. Not sure about those of the T20, though.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 09, 2023, 02:41:37 PMI finally found a use for my Verlinden M51 conversion set ..had that turret for yrs..typical resin gun though...badly bent.

Hard to fix, but you can get turned barrels for the M51 anyway.

Quote from: kerick on May 09, 2023, 10:02:41 PMGood idea on the green paint under the fenders and behind the wheels.

The idea was to just do it like they did on the real thing: overspray a green tank with sand :)

Quote from: kerick on May 09, 2023, 10:02:41 PMPlus IIRC didn't most forward deployed people wear NBC gear most of the time? One of the reasons they waited to invade, besides logistics, was cooler weather for the soldiers wearing NBC suits.

I think those fell by the wayside fairly quickly, plus tankers were in a vehicle with its own NBC system so they probably wouldn't have needed the NBC suits on all the time anyway. My main reference here was 100-Days, 100-Hours: "Phantom Brigade" in the Gulf War by Edgar A. Stitt (Hong Kong: Concord, 1991) and it doesn't show many tankers in NBC suits at all, but does have several clearly wearing the nomex overalls.

Quote from: Rick Lowe on May 09, 2023, 10:33:29 PMNice work on this, been fun scrolling through the journey so far.

And idea when/if it will make the trip off the Shelf'o'Doom and back onto the bench?

Thanks. And it has been finished by now — I just need to get round to posting the rest :)

Some neat work on those figures

Jak I sorted the resin gun problem..I replaced it with a slightly out of scale 128mm gun barrel and stuffed a muzzle brake on it 😳 😀

I had the set of figures ..still have the old guys Goat knocking around some where  ;D
It's a  nice set and I'll have to get another at some point.

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 10, 2023, 02:11:33 PMI sorted the resin gun problem..I replaced it with a slightly out of scale 128mm gun barrel and stuffed a muzzle brake on it 😳 😀

That works :) A few months ago I was at a model show where a vendor had some very old resin conversion sets from a French brand that, IIRC, is out of business, but I don't recall the name right now. In any case, one of the sets I looked at while browsing, had a resin gun barrel in it that was bent literally into a circle ...

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 10, 2023, 02:11:33 PMstill have the old guys Goat knocking around some where  ;D

Same :)

OK, the last photo I posted of the M70A2 was taken on 4 September 2019. I continued on 11 December 2021 by spraying lightening patches over the sand:

IMG_8311.jpeg

However, something had to be done about the green. I had never been happy with it — despite the bottle calling it "forest green", I always thought it looked far too light for US forest green as used on Abramses, Bradleys, etc. in the 1980s. Doing a bit of research online, I discovered Humbrol 116 is supposedly a good match, and happily, I had a tin of that. Rather than spraying it, I brush-painted all the green bits that would be visible, like on the rear sides of the lower hull:

IMG_8312.jpeg

I followed that up with a medium brown wash over all of the sand colour:

IMG_8315.jpeg

And then two stages of drybrushing, first with a colour a bit paler than the basic sand, followed by one that was a good degree lighter still:

IMG_8317.jpegIMG_8319.jpeg

I then applied decals:

IMG_8320.jpegIMG_8321.jpeg

These are from an Echelon set for the M1A1 Abrams (https://www.scalemates.com/kits/echelon-fine-details-d356025-m1a1-abrams-in-ods-3-67-ar-tiger-brigade--225261), as those make sense for a tank that has taken the place the M1 has in the real world. The markings on the ammo cans on the bustle rack are from the Tamiya M1A1 kit, as it seems to have been common practice to mark each of those with whose can it was. Which kind of says something about the intelligence of tankers, I suppose, if you can't remember which of four (IRL) bolted-down cans is yours ... ;)

Jak that looks pretty damn sweet mate and that 120 has balanced the entire vehicle out perfectly.

As for the markings on the ammo cans..well that's so other units don't try to let's say "borrow" things 😉
It's actually to keep mud away from the tanks ID for command purposes. 🙃

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 12, 2023, 11:34:58 AMthat 120 has balanced the entire vehicle out perfectly.

It does look rather better than the stubby 152 mm, definitely. Though if I do another, it will probably be a "what if" Dutch Army vehicle that's pretty much a standard KPz 70 with things like Dutch smoke launchers and other things that the Leopard 1(NL) got compared to the German version. Maybe even a KPz 70-V ...

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 12, 2023, 11:34:58 AMAs for the markings on the ammo cans..well that's so other units don't try to let's say "borrow" things 😉

I doubt it, because the boxes have the crew functions stencilled on them :)

Quote from: Jakko on May 12, 2023, 01:17:50 PM

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 12, 2023, 11:34:58 AMthat 120 has balanced the entire vehicle out perfectly.

It does look rather better than the stubby 152 mm, definitely. Though if I do another, it will probably be a "what if" Dutch Army vehicle that's pretty much a standard KPz 70 with things like Dutch smoke launchers and other things that the Leopard 1(NL) got compared to the German version. Maybe even a KPz 70-V ...

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 12, 2023, 11:34:58 AMAs for the markings on the ammo cans..well that's so other units don't try to let's say "borrow" things 😉

I doubt it, because the boxes have the crew functions stencilled on them :)

Don't doubt it mate...you'd be amazed at how we would get certain things which were deemed "very important " 😉
and cans of spray paint are very easy to get from the motor pool 🙄
It's been going for absolute decades..in the Vietnam War when M-134 mini guns got mounted onto armoured vehicles in combat for the first time guess how the first guns were acquired?? 😆
Things like 40mm ammo boxes weren't easy to get for armoured vehicle crews as they didn't use 40mm apart from the M79 GL..so when ever they could "borrow" em they did.. great for dozens of things including being used as a washing machine  :thumbsup:
It's known as a Permanently borrowed item .
Today its much easier cause of automatic 40mm launchers like the MK19.

It dates back even further than that...

One story that's a favourite of mine is how the NZ Armoured unit during WW2 in Italy found and appropriated an entire T2 recovery vehicle...! ;D  :thumbsup:

But I'm sure even the Roman army had the same issues... or the Hebrews of OT time.

I served with a Warrant Officer who had served in Vietnam.  His favourite story was how he "acquired" a Jeep from the US Army over a card game,  When he turned up at the Australian Task Force his superior said to him, "That he either gets some 'roos on it by tonight or it goes back, understand?"  He had some 'roos marked on its bonnet sides immediately and he drove it the rest of his tour and handed it onto his successor.   He used to run Local Purchase for the Task Force and some amazing stories to tell. :thumbsup:

I know where you guys are comin from ..heard the stories ..been on the receiving end of a British army BDU winter jacket which I won't say anymore about  ;)
I know what us mud monkeys are like and you get told about nailing everything down so it won't get nicked..that's why we have crow bars  ;D
Vietnam was the place I heard alot of stories about ..nailed down..welded shut...bolted and welded and still didn't stop em  :lol:

Quote from: Wardukw-NZ on May 12, 2023, 01:51:48 PMDon't doubt it mate...you'd be amazed at how we would get certain things which were deemed "very important " 😉

I know that, but what I meant is: stencilling the crew functions on the boxes wouldn't help with that — putting, say, the tank number on it would, of course, but "DRV" could be the box of any driver in the army.

So good to see this. Said it before and will say it again. Everything just works on this build

OK, so those last images were from 2021, are there any later images & when are we going to see the finished build? :unsure:

Impatient people (me) want to know! ;)  ;D

I'm trying to keep you all in suspense ;) I'll continue soon.

On with the tracks!

This is a tank in the desert, so there would be no rust on the tracks — that tends to get polished off really quickly by the sand, resulting in shiny metal parts. I first sprayed the tracks with Tamiya NATO Black, which is actually very dark grey. To get them to look more like rubber, I then put on a wash of thinned Indian ink, and once that had dried, painted the metal parts with a light–medium grey, though not all the way into all the recesses:

IMG_8322.jpeg

The next step was to put GW Boltgun Metal over the grey:

IMG_8323.jpeg

This because doing the metallic colour straight over the dark grey would have made it look darker than I wanted. I also, again, tried to not cover the grey completely but leave some in the deeper areas.

Then a layer of Army Painter Strong Tone to shade the metal areas:

IMG_8324.jpeg

With on the left side of the track, without on the right, to show the difference.

Both tracks done:

IMG_8325.jpeg

Note I skipped part of the end connectors, as those will be on the inside and therefore, completely out of sight.

And then I drybrushed the rubber parts with dark grey to bring out the detail and enhance the "rubber" appearance:

IMG_8326.jpeg

By the way, if you decide to also use Indian ink for rubber parts, beware that a wash made from acrylic paint plus water is likely to have the ink run. A quick coat of matt varnish over the ink prevents that, though. I didn't do that here because I wasn't going to put a wash onto the tracks, but I discovered this small problem the hard way on another model.

To attach the track to the tank, the idea was to wrap it around the wheels and then pull the ends together with thread to get the track on tight. I drilled two holes through each of the end links for the thread to go through, but couldn't pull the thread taut and tie the ends together because of the limited space I had to work in, coupled to my never having been a scout or a sailor (hence lacking in the knot-tying skills department :)) so eventually I gave up and used copper wire instead:

IMG_8327.jpeg

That went much better.

Except ...

IMG_8328.jpeg

The idler mounts are weak enough that the track pulled the idler at an angle :( So I cut the wire again and instead, superglued the track to the wheels:

IMG_8329.jpeg

Lovely looking tracks mate..clean and defined  :thumbsup:
But don't ya just hate that annoying cockeyed drive or just road wheels in general when they don't sit square? .
I've had it on cheap models and bloody expensive ones..even had it with that Strumpanther Panther and mate the roads wheels sucked dew to being very tight.
Now I didn't make build those wheels..I scored 3 partly started models in a deal ..all Meng ..the Panther ..M3A3 Bradley with the extra interior set for $90nz ..if i had built them I would have found out early how hard they are to fit ..or just read a review and found that way..which i did in the end anyway  ;D
This looking bloody fantastic bud and I'm looking forward to more pics 📸 😀

Suspension seems to be Dragon's weak point.  I have an M103 which regularly sheds road wheels at the suspension points.  Trumpeter seems to have the problem licked, I have their AFVs which seem much more solidly designed,   :banghead:

Quote from: rickshaw on May 16, 2023, 06:59:17 PMSuspension seems to be Dragon's weak point.  I have an M103 which regularly sheds road wheels at the suspension points.  Trumpeter seems to have the problem licked, I have their AFVs which seem much more solidly designed,  :banghead:

The biggest problem with Dragon is they try to make their parts as close to spec as possible with makes then weak..torsion arms are basically never seen and Trumpeter know that so they make the back side thicker.
I've had dozens of models from both those two and I've noticed many times that the torsion arms are bending under the models own weight..it's a real pain.

Quote from: Wardukw on May 16, 2023, 10:13:24 AMBut don't ya just hate that annoying cockeyed drive or just road wheels in general when they don't sit square? .

Yep, though this one was really my own fault for pulling the track too tight :(

Quote from: Wardukw on May 16, 2023, 10:13:24 AMThis looking bloody fantastic bud and I'm looking forward to more pics 📸 😀

Thanks :)

Quote from: rickshaw on May 16, 2023, 06:59:17 PMSuspension seems to be Dragon's weak point.  I have an M103 which regularly sheds road wheels at the suspension points.  Trumpeter seems to have the problem licked, I have their AFVs which seem much more solidly designed,   :banghead:

Trumpeter kits are often a bit more clunky, though :) Not my favourite brand, though they do have a lot of things you don't find anywhere else.

Naturally, I also painted the machine-gun turret:

IMG_8331.jpeg

Most of the gun and mounting are black with gunmetal or grey drybrushing, with the interior of the turret and its hatches in forest green. The little connecting rods that open and close the hatches automatically are still unpainted here, as you can see, because I only attached the hatches once I had glued the gun mount into the turret.

Time for an overall view of the model as it stood at this point:

IMG_8332.jpeg

Fitting the mine plough was straightforward enough, but I discovered I had left off something reasonably important:

IMG_8334.jpeg

On the M1 plough mounting, there are two eyes that I didn't understand the point of, so I hadn't made them for my replacement mounting. It turns out that these are for attaching some of the chains that go on the plough, so I had to quickly knock some up from plastic card. They were painted to match the rest of the model after I took the photo, of course. (The other white areas are where I scraped away the paint so the brackets holding the plough arms can be glued in place later on.)

Those chains go on like this:

IMG_8340.jpeg

The chain, BTW, comes from the Tamiya M1A1 kit that also supplied the plough itself. However, Tamiya's instructions for how to fit the chains are not that great, IIRC. It took me a fair amount of looking at photos of the real thing to figure it all out. I then glued the plough arms to the tank, with all the other gubbins attached to them, and put more chains on, of course:

IMG_8342.jpeg

The brass roller part lying on one of the skids is also supplied by Tamiya. Very nice, and much better than Dragon's plastic version because if you model the plough with the roller hanging between the skids, as it would while actually demining, its weight will pull the chain down correctly. The thing appears to usually have been stowed inside one of the skids otherwise, though, so that's why I glued it there.

And how the other chains run from the mounting plate to the rear of the blast shield:

IMG_8344.jpeg

After that, I painted the chains, which is trickier than it sounds. I had to pull them taut with the rear end of a brush while daubing paint on them with another, else there was no way to get it on the chains at all because of the way they kept moving.

That done, I added the pull handle for manually releasing the hooks that hold the ploughs up:

IMG_8352.jpeg

The handle is also included in the Tamiya kit, as is the copper wire I used. On the M1A1, this handle appears to have been tied to something high up on the glacis, but the only real thing to tie it to here is the headlight guard. I later painted the thread I used blue, to represent some random bit of nylon rope the crew must have found.

And another overview of the whole model, now with the mine plough:

IMG_8359.jpeg

Oh yeah, the various periscopes that don't have clear parts were painted matt black and when that had dried, "coloured" in completely with an HB pencil. This gives them both depth and a sheen that isn't apparent from all angles, and IMHO makes them look much more like glass periscopes than just painting them does.

Very very nice matey 👍 👌 😊

That is very good! :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

Attention to detail is almost over the top - but not quite. ;)

That's going to really turn some heads at a show if you're into that. It looks so completely real! Well done!

Thanks :) It would be nice taking this to a show with people who know their tanks, but that's unlikely to happen :(

A double thumbs up  :thumbsup:  :thumbsup:

This looking very good! Worth the attempt to smuggle it into a "normal" model exhibition.  :thumbsup:

Quote from: Jakko on May 19, 2023, 02:24:39 AMThanks :) It would be nice taking this to a show with people who know their tanks, but that's unlikely to happen :(

I don't know, there are innumerable universal-multi-disciplinary experts around. I'm sure if you took it to a show at least one person will swear to having seen them operational in Kuwait or Iraq. :wacko:

" see that, i was a commander in one of thouse i was,  but i cant tell you more, its all hush, hush"  :banghead:  :banghead:

Quote from: Dizzyfugu on May 20, 2023, 03:16:35 AMWorth the attempt to smuggle it into a "normal" model exhibition.  :thumbsup:

Definitely, but even getting to most model exhibitions, let alone doing so with models, is difficult for me due to a combination of a dependance on public transport on my part coupled to model exhibitions in this country generally being organised far away from good public transport links :(

Quote from: Old Wombat on May 20, 2023, 08:15:31 AMI'm sure if you took it to a show at least one person will swear to having seen them operational in Kuwait or Iraq. :wacko:

Almost certainly :) It would be worth it just for that.

The crew was painted in OD uniforms:

IMG_8358.jpeg

No point in painting the lower legs of the commander and driver, they'll be out of sight anyway.

I also selected stuff to stow on the tank and painted it:

IMG_8354.jpeg

Most of this is Tamiya, from accessory sets and a few AFV kits, but there is also some Academy in there as well as AFV Club .50 calibre ammo boxes and an Italeri Leopard 2 wheel. This because the Leopard 2 has the same diameter wheels as the KPz 70, even if they're not exactly the same; I had to drill ten holes instead of the Leopard 2's eight for that reason too. The jack is a part from a Second World War German vehicle kit, but these really are industry-standard jacks that turn up everywhere, are there are some photos of M1A1s in the Gulf War that have a sand-painted one in the bustle rack.

A quick photo for my own reference, really, so I could remember where it all was supposed to go:

IMG_8353.jpeg

Then it just remained to glue it all in place:

IMG_8362.jpeg

As you can see, a lot of it isn't where I had decided to put it at first :)

As well as make up some straps for the ALICE packs hanging from the side stowage rack bars:

IMG_8365.jpeg

These are some bits cut from the metal of an empty tube of superglue, in the right shape for ALICE pack straps (owning real ones helped a lot there too :)) that only needed to be painted OD afterward:

IMG_8366.jpeg

 ;D  ;D sweet stuff mate  :thumbsup:

This looks so well done and realistic I'm sure many people in many places would be fooled.
It always bugs me that anything "soft" like camo net bundles and ALICE packs at molded with detail all the way around. Makes difficult to apply it to "hard" objects like a tank or truck bed. Lots of carving even in the best kits.

Quote from: kerick on May 22, 2023, 02:04:46 PMIt always bugs me that anything "soft" like camo net bundles and ALICE packs at molded with detail all the way around. Makes difficult to apply it to "hard" objects like a tank or truck bed. Lots of carving even in the best kits.

At the same time it means that it may be able to be fitted in to different positions; so a camo net or tarp, for example, which may usually sit draped over something thusly " Ո ", may be able to sit dropped into something thisly " U ".

I find I have more issues having to create detail on flat "underside" surfaces that I do having to remove detail.

Quote from: Old Wombat on May 22, 2023, 06:32:15 PM

Quote from: kerick on May 22, 2023, 02:04:46 PMIt always bugs me that anything "soft" like camo net bundles and ALICE packs at molded with detail all the way around. Makes difficult to apply it to "hard" objects like a tank or truck bed. Lots of carving even in the best kits.

At the same time it means that it may be able to be fitted in to different positions; so a camo net or tarp, for example, which may usually sit draped over something thusly " Ո ", may be able to sit dropped into something thisly " U ".

I find I have more issues having to create detail on flat "underside" surfaces that I do having to remove detail.

True. I just cringe when I have to cram a pilot figure with a soft butt into a seat that has a soft cushion when they are both made of hard plastic. It just doesn't sit well with me..........




 ;D

Quote from: kerick on May 22, 2023, 09:30:25 PMIt just doesn't sit well with me..........
 ;D

:banghead:  :banghead:  :rolleyes:

Quote from: kerick on May 22, 2023, 02:04:46 PMThis looks so well done and realistic I'm sure many people in many places would be fooled.

I hope so ... :)

Quote from: kerick on May 22, 2023, 02:04:46 PMIt always bugs me that anything "soft" like camo net bundles and ALICE packs at molded with detail all the way around. Makes difficult to apply it to "hard" objects like a tank or truck bed. Lots of carving even in the best kits.

IMHO, the trick is to pick items that fit reasonably well :) What I've also seen (in articles in magazines) is to sculpt some of the stowage yourself from epoxy putty, but use plastic or resin "standard" parts on top of that — so you can make them sit as you want without looking unrealistic. But I don't like epoxy putty and my sculpting skills are not great.

One of my favourite tricks to use up various "not good" equipment is to put them into stowage bins & drape a canvas tarpaulin over them.

When doing this I often use random bits of scrap styrene/resin, too, to add shapes under the tarp. My preferred tarpaulin material is Aves Apoxy Sculpt rolled thin (that is the trickiest bit but any minor issues can be fixed easily enough), cut a rectangle to size & drop over the bin, then push it down gently with a damp sponge &/or firm(ish) brush; at this stage you can create wrinkles & folds which make it look more realistic. You can, also, fold it back on itself & make hem lines by running a spatula just in from the edge.

Tissue & "lead" foil are other alternatives but I find the way that Apoxy Sculpt can be made to flow over the shapes is a touch more realistic.

Great work! The figures and kit look amazing!

Thanks :)

Quote from: Old Wombat on May 23, 2023, 08:26:36 AMOne of my favourite tricks to use up various "not good" equipment is to put them into stowage bins & drape a canvas tarpaulin over them.

That works too, though for anything that will be completely out of sight, I would consider it a bit of a waste — bits of styrofoam or balsa carved to shape would do just as well then :)

Ah, yes, but I usually have parts of those pieces exposed &, as I said, bits of left over styrene & resin to bulk up the unseen bits. ;)

Quote from: Old Wombat on May 23, 2023, 08:26:36 AMTissue & "lead" foil are other alternatives but I find the way that Apoxy Sculpt can be made to flow over the shapes is a touch more realistic.

Parafilm M works well.  You can stretch it as thin as you like and if you want it thicker than it comes, you can fold it up and squeeze out the creases.

Never thought of parafilm!

Quote from: kerick on May 25, 2023, 08:21:55 PMNever thought of parafilm!

What the hell is paraflim???

I was wondering about that too ... A quick search turns up that it's some kind of stretching, laboratory tape that some people apparently use for masking models with.

It just occurred to me that I forgot to post the photos of the completed model ... So here they are:

IMG_8367.jpegIMG_8368.jpegIMG_8369.jpegIMG_8370.jpegIMG_8372.jpegIMG_8374.jpegIMG_8376.jpeg     

Great build matey 👍  ;D

Quote from: Jakko on May 26, 2023, 01:32:07 AMI was wondering about that too ... A quick search turns up that it's some kind of stretching, laboratory tape that some people apparently use for masking models with.

They do, but it takes a bit of practice

Very good.

 :thumbsup:

Oh, that's excellent.  :thumbsup:  :wub:  :thumbsup:

Quote from: Wardukw on May 25, 2023, 08:41:15 PM

Quote from: kerick on May 25, 2023, 08:21:55 PMNever thought of parafilm!

What the hell is paraflim???

Quote from: Jakko on May 26, 2023, 01:32:07 AMI was wondering about that too ... A quick search turns up that it's some kind of stretching, laboratory tape that some people apparently use for masking models with.

Quote from: NARSES2 on May 26, 2023, 05:43:38 AMThey do, but it takes a bit of practice

Yep, you can get it relatively cheaply from eBay, a small 5m roll will last ages.  I've used it in several labs, it's like stretchy cling film that doesn't stick to itself with the slightest draft and it's solvent resistant. 

I've got some stuff that I, ahem, liberated.  It's a bit old and snaps a bit easier than when new, but otherwise still good.  Chris is right, it takes a little practice but is worth getting to know it's idiosyncrasies.  I used it as a windscreen tarp on a RAF Gulf War Corsair, took two attempts but looks good.

Quote from: Wardukw on May 26, 2023, 01:55:45 AMGreat build matey 👍  ;D

Quote from: zenrat on May 26, 2023, 06:46:06 AMVery good.

 :thumbsup:

Quote from: Mossie on May 26, 2023, 09:42:54 AMOh, that's excellent.  :thumbsup:  :wub:  :thumbsup:

Thanks :) I enjoyed building it — well, for the most part :) — and I'm happy with the way it came out in the end.

That's an awesome tank!! Love it! It was a lot of work but worth it.

Thanks :) These things always turn out to be more work than expected, of course ... but then, so does pretty much everything else I build :-\

Great build.  I found it in the Whiffie nomination thread and had to come check it out.  neat idea, great problem solving and an excellent finish.  Definitely Whiffie worthy.

Most excellent.

I ran out of boxes to tick on this build about 5 pages back.. so I just drew my own at the bottom to add some more.
Great build

Thanks, and I'm honoured to be nominated :)

Excellent finish! :thumbsup:

Still needs a BIG box of barf bags in the equipment racks, though! ;)

The driver in the hatch hides the rack for them quite nicely, so I didn't need to build that :)

Driver is limited to only peanut butter sandwiches for meals while on duty. Tastes the same coming up as it did going down........

It's no doubt hidden in the body of the vehicle, but I assume that the tank is fitted with a BOILING VESSEL  for making mugs of NATO standard tea/coffee whilst the machine is in action.

  It has been said that US tank crews saw this device in use on joint exercises , resulting in a "Heater, Water & Rations"  being fitted in US armour  from about 1990 (ish) onwards..   

Several low friends in high places tell me  :-
 A)  that almost every UK military vehicle now has a BV 
 B)  that a vehicle with a defective BV is not considered properly equipped for active service
 C)  that  the most junior member of the vehicle crew is appointed "BV  commander"   
 D)   It's the most  important piece of kit  in a British AFV
E)  It actually makes good military sense  for crew survival and thus morale.  World War 2  many of the casualties among British tank crews occurred when they were outside the tank brewing up. How well does a tank crew perform over a long duration  if they don't have access to hot food and drinks especially in colder climates? The BV allow the crew have water to heat food, make hot drinks and even to some extent wash themselves without having to leave the relative safety of the tank.

  Forum members with practical experience of this device may wish to comment further.

Quote from: Rheged on May 28, 2023, 12:35:41 PMIt's no doubt hidden in the body of the vehicle, but I assume that the tank is fitted with a BOILING VESSEL  for making mugs of NATO standard tea/coffee whilst the machine is in action.

  It has been said that US tank crews saw this device in use on joint exercises , resulting in a "Heater, Water & Rations"  being fitted in US armour  from about 1990 (ish) onwards..   

Several low friends in high places tell me  :-
 A)  that almost every UK military vehicle now has a BV 
 B)  that a vehicle with a defective BV is not considered properly equipped for active service
 C)  that  the most junior member of the vehicle crew is appointed "BV  commander"   
 D)   It's the most  important piece of kit  in a British AFV
E)  It actually makes good military sense  for crew survival and thus morale.  World War 2  many of the casualties among British tank crews occurred when they were outside the tank brewing up. How well does a tank crew perform over a long duration  if they don't have access to hot food and drinks especially in colder climates? The BV allow the crew have water to heat food, make hot drinks and even to some extent wash themselves without having to leave the relative safety of the tank.

  Forum members with practical experience of this device may wish to comment further.

Since I wasn't a armour crewman I didn't have access to one but we did enjoy the benefits of em more than once  ;D
One thing we did use for those cold days was a trick used by the Brits in the desert in WW2.
Steel bucket..sand..petrol and a lighter  :thumbsup:
A super simple device for cooking ..boiling water for the most important liquids in the world..tea or coffee and no exposed flame .
This we found very helpful when there was a group who needed more water boiled than our little stoves could muster...can also be used as a cooking spit  ;D

Quote from: Wardukw on May 28, 2023, 01:04:32 PMOne thing we did use for those cold days was a trick used by the Brits in the desert in WW2.
Steel bucket..sand..petrol and a lighter  :thumbsup:
A super simple device for cooking ..boiling water for the most important liquids in the world..tea or coffee and no exposed flame .

Known by the 8th Army as a Benghazi Burner.   I agree they are most efficient at any time and in any place that a brew is needed.     

Quote from: Rheged on May 28, 2023, 01:09:01 PM

Quote from: Wardukw on May 28, 2023, 01:04:32 PMOne thing we did use for those cold days was a trick used by the Brits in the desert in WW2.
Steel bucket..sand..petrol and a lighter  :thumbsup:
A super simple device for cooking ..boiling water for the most important liquids in the world..tea or coffee and no exposed flame .

Known by the 8th Army as a Benghazi Burner.   I agree they are most efficient at any time and in any place that a brew is needed.     

Ahhh ..mate never knew what that was called..
 We basically called it that British cooker sand idea thing  ;D
But yeah it was brilliant.

Quote from: Rheged on May 28, 2023, 12:35:41 PMSeveral low friends in high places tell me  :-
 A)  that almost every UK military vehicle now has a BV 
 

The Chieftain ARV that I worked on in Newcastle had TWO BVs, the crews reckoned it was the height of luxury to be assigned to one of them.  ;D

Quote from: Rheged on May 28, 2023, 12:35:41 PM"Heater, Water & Rations"  being fitted in US armour  from about 1990 (ish) onwards.. 

The most recent TM I have is for the M2A2 and M3A2 ODS Bradleys, dated January 1997, and it includes instructions for the use of the MRE heater (this is the name used in the manual) that it comes with. The thing itself is a rectangular box with controls on the front and a removable lid, as well as a removable "container" inside. Apparently it's intended both for heating MRE rations and boiling water, the latter by removing the container and putting about four litres of water in to the heater itself, which can then be gotten out by means of a tap on the front.

So yeah, sounds like the American version of the British BV. Except I suspect the British don't issue four pages of instructions on how to use it, let alone say:—

QuoteWARNING
Hot parts can burn you. Container and handle will get extremely hot. Use lid hooks and gloves to handle container.

... four times in three pages :)

Not being a Tread-head, I never saw or used on of these, when I was in the army.  Anyway, we more often than not was "tac" or "tactical" and not allowed hot meals.  We basically subsisted on cold food, usually straight from the RAT packs.  We could do that in Australia and the regions to our north where we used to deploy to.  The thing was we learnt the hard way in Vietnam that it was quite easy to smell diggers from quite a distance away because of what they ate and what they cooked, so we learnt to go cold.  About the only thing we used to have hot was Char and coffee.   :thumbsup: