BSY, your EB-66 is looking fabulous! I absolutely love it! Beautiful work on the painting and the scratchbuilt landing gear... simply WOW stuff!
68GT, your EF-111 is coming along very nicely. I look forward to seeing more progress.
Well, after being laid low by some bug on my days off last week, I was able to get back to the modeling bench for a few hours today, in between errands and dad duties and combinations of the two. So I decided to work on one of the sidelined AFV builds of mine that I have from quite awhile back that is closest to completion, Tamiya's M113 FSV.
As you can see it is fairly close to completion. But a month or two back Phil H had to post some info over on another thread telling of mods needing to be made to the kit to make it more accurate, so naturally I had to do a few of those plus add a couple of my own. I wont go into the reasons for the sidelining, but as of today the ball is rolling again for this build. I have no completed an AFV for awhile so I want to get a couple knocked out next. Enough random babbling anyways, on to today's work...
First up, my mods, I remembered the M113 vehicles that I had served on had wire mesh over the fan and radiator louvers so I dug through my old photo album and looked it up. A fairly fine mesh over the intake side and and larger grid mesh over the exhaust side. My mother in law who is staying with us on hospice care recently received a bouquet of flowers that came with some decorative fine mesh stuff that she threw away (and I dug out) that can do a battalion or two's worth of radiator/exhaust screens... and I had some left over mesh for the coarser exhaust stuff...
Big improvement I think. All my future 113 based kits will get this upgrade.
A spool on the rear of the turret just does not look right empty- I presume it is for commo wire, so I wound about 5 feet of thread around it and secured it all in place with thin super glue
and then I glued the spare track shoes in place on the glacis after having painted them separately eons ago...
And now for the Phil H mentioned mods: first up the Aussies added racks for Jerry cans on to the back of the FSVs rather than the simple channel lip that was originally on 113s for that purpose. I scrounged a couple up from a Verlinden accessory set, some Jerry cans from a Tamiya set and added some lead foil tie down straps and Verlinden resin clamps.
and finally, Phil H advised that there was a second radio antenna mount, not included in the kit, on the right side of the turret. So I scratch built the mount from some sheet plastic, and then the antenna base from a bit of tube plastic and one of those round bits you clip off your model parts thinned appropriately...
The one I scratch built pretty much matches the kit part and once painted should look the part... more to follow...