I’m building the acadamy 1\35 mh-60G pave hawk and I have some questions about the feed mechanism for the 7.62mm miniguns. I have the large ammo box that sits between the two guns but I can not find any renerence material on what the feed chutes look like. As well I’m not sure where the feed chutes attach to the amo box or the gun. Any help or refrence photos would be greatly appreciated. Does anyone know if the 50 cal.'s that are positioned in the large bay doors, are fed from the same anno box as the miniguns or do they have thier own ammo supply? Thanks in advance.
Aaron
I’m working on a Pavehawk, too. A good reference for pics is the USAF site http://www.af.mil/search/gallery.asp?mediaType=1&galleryID=41
try tiping minigun in the search window.
There is various military personell on the forum that will help you more than I can.
I don’t have any pictures of the ammo feed chutes for the Mini-gun and .50 cal’s but do have a couple of drawings that came with a 1/48 th High Flight conversion kit for the MH-60G. My scanner isn’t working but if you E-mail me with your “snail mail” address I’ll send you a copy of what I have. This is about 10 years old so I don’t know if any changes were made since. The ammo for all the guns is in the one central box. If you look at the top of your ammo box there are two fairly square pads with a tab sticking up. This is where Part G-53 goes, the .50 cal booster drive/adapter assemblies. These are for the .50 cal ammo chutes exiting to the rear. The other is a long “L” shape on the right top side. This is for the right mini-gun feed chute. The other “L” shape is on the rear of the ammo box and this is for the left mini-gun feed chute. The mini-gun feed chutes just weave around on the floor over to the mini-guns where as the .50 cal’s go up to bracing on the roof for a little more elaborate feed. It seems funny MRC neglected to have any feed chutes in the kit with all the other detail they give you.
Hey guys,
I’ve been with an HH-60G/HC-130 rescue squadron for the past 14 years. Here’s the deal. If your doing an MH-60G then go right ahead with installing the .50 cals. If you’re doing an HH-60G, leave them off. The HH-60G is simply a rescue version of an MH-60G. When the 55th SOS went away a few years ago, so did the only MH-60G’s. Their helo’s went to various rescue squadrons. This shows a simple fact, and that is that the MH-60G and HH-60G are basically the same with the same systems. Especially since all HH-60G’s now have FLIR etc… Truth be known, the SOS birds and rescue birds both did the same missions…Special Ops support and Rescue, the only difference was which one was the primary mission, and which one was secondary mission. It was a 50-50 deal anyway you look at it.
As far as the .50 cal’s go, the only time I ever seen them installed was at the tactics center down at Nellis AFB Nevada, with the 422 TES. They were the ones that came up with the idea for the high bird to have the .50’s along with the GAU-2B miniguns, to act as a heavy cover ship for the low bird (pick-up bird). The idea was that the .50 cals would extend the range that the GAU-2’s didn’t have (especially in the sand box), and to add a semi-hard target capability.
Truth be known, I’ve never seen this done operationally in any MH-60G and I can tell you that we don’t currently employ the .50 cal’s in our HH-60G’s.
In fact, the only .50 cal’s we have in our armory are the .50 cal Barrett sniper rifles we have in our PJ section.
Just tryin to help,
I’ll see if I have any shots from Afghanistan showing our GAU-2B’s and the associated feed trays. If so I’ll e-mail em to ya.
That is probably why we don’t see any pictures of them. One of a kind. The only shot I saw in Squadron’s In Action book on the UH-60 shows the .50 cal’s in the doorway with a long narrow ammo can across in front of the fuel cells. The ammo chutes didn’t appear to be connected. Anybody know how the SOAR 160th Blackhawks have their Mini-gun feed and ammo cans set up?
I just found this page that has some detailed pics of minigun and ammobox:
http://www.ballistic-studios.com/users/tigershark/research/HH-60G/index_2.htm
Hope it helps
Avus,
Looks like a lot shorter ammo box from the kit and has two sections, one for each gun. You can see a side shot behind the Rescue Hoist. Too bad there wasn’t a shot of the ammo feed chutes. Thanks for posting the site.
There is a pic of the configuration your talking about at http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.com in the walkaround section under helicopters.
Mogwa
To a;; in this post,
I just sent Avus a pic from one of our Pavehawks in Afghanistan, which clearly shows the ammo bins, feed chutes, crewmembers M-4 carbines, etc… Send me an e-mail with YOUR e-mail (or post it here) if you want me to send the pic. It’s large and you can zoom in to your hearts content (but you shouldn’t have too).[:D][:D][:D]
BTW, this is how the miniguns are set up for ANY/ALL H-60’s that use them.
M-60 and M-240 guns simply use a standard ammo can attached to the weapon.
Oops! I seemed to trip over one of the few pics of a Pavehawk with the door mounted M-2s !
This page has a few pics of the GAU-2B miniguns:
http://www.combatindex.com/hardware/detail/cannon/gau2.html
Notice the grey paint scheme (MH-60G). Looks like one of the test birds from the 422 TES out of Nellis (grey color, no dings, scratches or faded paint). Like I said before…never employed operationally that I know of. Cool picture though!
Ive been getting lot’s of responses requesting the photo of the ammo storage/feed system for the H-60 miniguns. I’ve also gotten quite a few responses saying it was just what they were looking for. Gald I could help and keep the requests coming.
There’s a gentleman from Singapore who needs to resend me his e-mail address as for some reason it got deleted. His e-mail address starts with “wang”
Hi Sal,
Mr. Wang wrote to me ,too and I sent him the pic. I beleive everything went fine since I got no error message.
Hi Sal & Avus,
Thanks for the response. I ve got the pics from Avus. Its great. Once again, thanks to both of u.
Cheers…Wang K L
Thanks Avus. [:D]
Glad you liked the pic Wang.