Hello Armour Forum. I started the old Tamiya M577 Command Vehicle a while back. Deciding to put it in a diorama and open some hatches and rear ramp left me with a dilema…there is not much inside a Tamiya M577!.
Does anyone have any pics that show some detail of the interior of this vehicle. Pics of radios that may have been used i am looking for too. I am portraying mine as an Aussie vehicle in Vietnam and assume these were pretty much the same as US vehicles at the time. Over here we call them an M113 ACV(Armoured Command Vehicle).
I have been searching the internet hi and low and have only come up with some poor pics of the interiors of Aussie vehicles.
Thanks a lot for that link redleg. I browsed Heavy’s pics and they have given me some great ideas to use as a guide. I am not sure if the Aussie layout was the same as the Americans. We seem to like to change everything over here.
Here are the only two good pics i have with interiors…
And here is what i have done so far. I did this a while back but came to a stand still in not having any good reference material, not for want of searching…[banghead]… I have a long way to go…
Thanks to HeavyArty for building such a superb model ! [bow][bow][bow]
Here is the new floor. It is only sitting there for now, i still have to glue it down and do a bit of tidying up. It is just foil burnished over the section of floor from an academy M113 kit. Got the idea from a post made by Hans von Hammer in another thread.
An FYI, there is a guy over at Armorama who is rather obsessive about Aussie M113 series vehicles. He should be able to help you with anything you need.
No problem, there seem to be a couple of guys building armor from down under on armorama from time to time. I saw this a few days ago and was lucky enough to find it!
Just out of curiousity, does anybody know where they put the fuel tank in these vehicles? Doesn’t appear to be in the usual place. I can only assume that it was reconfigured and put underneath the working surfaces/counters of the radio compartment.
You got any styrene sheet lying around? glue the floor panel to the sheet then you will have a bit more stability and you can glue it down more solidly with Testors glue than with just CA glue.
Thanks for your replies gentlemen. Hopefully i will try and sort this floor out tonight.
Originally i was going to use the Firestorm Sandbag ‘Floor’ set with this vehicle. Not sure if this would have been used in the M577, and not finding any references, i decided to use the sandbags in a normal M113 APC for another dio idea. So i needed to do another floor, hence the stage i am at now. Only problem is i have built the floor up to the level of the ramp. Now i can’t use anything too thick…[banghead]
In between doing research on my project i got the floor put down. Going really gently with the thin foil, i managed to glue it down and centralise it. Then i added strips of 5mm wide pieces of styrene to each side to finish it off for now. I primed it with some grey and then gave it a wash of black to blend it all in. The black wash should work to darken and preshade to final coat of paint.
The ‘Jackie’ box (wooden storage box) up in the right hand corner (second pic) of the radio compartment is made of resin. I have never worked with resin before. It is certauinly different!! Very hard and brittle. Lots of care and a sharp knife to clean up details. A blunt knife just made it crumble!
This is my first scratchbuilding project and i am having fun. I have a lot to learn.
I do believe i am in the best of company on these forums…[#toast]
You need to size the pictures at your photo hosting site. I’ve got my accounts set at 800 x 600 for the most part, although I have some that are bigger at Image Shack…
Overall, your pics are ok on my screen, since the forum software appears to keep it realistic unless you click on the pic to expand it…
The forum software in that it displays your pics in a “preview” size, and when you click on the preview, it opens the pic full size. However, there is a quirk in the forum software in that after clicking on a “preview” pic, if you leave the thread and return to it at a later time, the “preview” is displayed as a partial of the full size pic, rather than the previous preview pic. You can fix this temporarily by refreshing the page in your browser.
Just while I’m here, when you come to do the exterior of your 557, you may wish to extend the lip of the trim vane by about 4 scale inches to bring it up to size - the trim vane in the Tamiya kit is too narrow. A strip of 0.125 x 0.040 styrene should get you pretty close.
