Honestly I was demoralized, I was so into the builds. I had pictures and extra parts everything laid out. So I started the builds and when I reached a certain point my brain clicked in said this doesn’t look right. I had driven them in the Army. So I went to the pictures, something I should have done earlier, my ignorance and now I know better, I’m still somewhat of a neophyte.
The back of the M577 is completely wrong, almost every detail is wrong. The top of the M113 is wrong, from the way the drivers hatch closes and opens to the rear hatch being upside down. I didn’t think they could make such glaring mistakes and sell them like that. But guess what, they do. The fix on the Tamiya M48A3 is an easy one, the M113 is not. You have to completely redo the drivers hatch, how do you do that? It’s not worth the work when you have the much better but a little more expensive Academy kit available. The top of the Tamiya M106 fits the Acad kit almost perfectly, the M577 is a little harder but that doesn’t matter as you have to sand down he whole back and rebuild it anyway. The M132 is from the Acad kit so those are the variants used by the US in Vietnam. And the M125 which was not used a lot and replaced or rebuilt. I even have the Verlinden conversion to the M something with the side firing ports.
I still have a bunch of barbed wire rolled up for those vehicles.
The M548 is a good kit from AFV and expensive, too bad they don’t make variants of those or conversions that was used in Nam, as far as I know. I even have the quad 50 version but that was only tried and rejected by the troops, it looks cool but it was not used at all. I think there was one vehicle and it looked so cool they added it to the kit, I guess. In actuality the M548 had issues with carrying weight, the chassis was flimsy.