TONS of 1/350 vehicles. But no ideas on what to do with them

General Discussion
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A long, long time ago, I bought a 1/350 scale USS Wasp and a USS San Diego amphibious ships. Both ship kits came with plenty of US Marine armor vehicles and aircraft. But I also long ago bought extra packages of MRC US Marines Armor Accessories and US Marines Aircraft Accessories.
But as time went by, I never did build the ships into the amphibious assault ships that they were supposed to be. And now here it is years later and I’m stuck with TONS of 1/350 scale US Marine armor vehicles and aircraft and don’t know what to do with them all. A sample picture is below.
So far, I have:
10 x M1 Abrams tanks
8 x M60 tanks
8 x Howitzers
7 x Large cargo trucks
10 x M1114 Humvees
7 x M1097 Humvees
8 x LAV-25’s
10 x AAV7A1’s

And I also have 2 leftover LCAC hovercraft, plus 4 (or less) of each of the following aircraft: V-22, CH-53, SH-60, AV-8B, AH-1W, and one other type which I don’t remember.

I don’t want to give away any of this stuff…yet. I’d like to use it all for something. I just don’t know what. And I have no plans in the future to buy/build another amphibious ship kit.
Anybody have any suggestions on what I can do with all this? Any ideas?

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After seeing some of the projects that you have done in that scale, have you ever considered doing a dockside diorama? The soft skins could be used as various support type vehicles on the pier (medical, resupply, etc).

As for the armoured vehicles, not quite as straight forward, but maybe a thought….especially due to your WIF experience.

Conversion to support vehicles for maintenance, loading, unloading, fire fighting, specialty transport. I’m thinking a tracked (M1) drone transport / crane vehicle or the like. I’m just thinking about some of the conversions based on older, decommissioned armour of the past, bulldozers, cranes, jet powered fire fighting….. just some of the ideas I can see being reasonable.

As a bonus, you would have a bunch of M1 and other turrets to use on maybe a heavy support / coastal gun boat. (Think riverine during Vietnam, but heavier). :grin:

1 Like
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@Frozin

No offense, but none of those ideas seems that interesting to me. Sorry.
The only idea I could come up with long ago was maybe to create some sort of military storage bunker diorama.
I have extra plastic base pieces from the old STAR WARS Battle of Hoth and Rebel Base model kits. Sample picture below. But my enthusiasm for using this type of idea is pretty low. Not really sure it’ll ever come to fruition.

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Well, with all that hardware, you could easily create a ‘large scene’ diorama where perhaps the units are massing for moving out on mission.

Off the top of my head: Leaving through the gates of a “Green Zone” deployment area out into the city that is being occupied.

Storming Fallujah, Tikrit, Kabul, etc.

Loading up: Having the M1A1s and M60’s being loaded up into C-5Aa and C-17s (not all of them, but it would make an interesting deployment scene, I think) as they are being ready to be deployed to the front.

And, aren’t you the modify it for a ‘what if it were like this’ guy?

Imagine the initial invasion into Iraq with the M1A1s and M60’s moving across the desert landscape with some Helos behind them carrying troops?

A convoy near Bagram, you’ve got a few M1A1s, plenty of cargo trucks, LAVs and HumVees encountering their first armed resistance?

Of course, you’re going to need some troops for all that, too – you know, to give it a more ‘alive’ atmosphere of a potential or virtual battle scene.

I could come up with more, however just off the top of my head those should work.

I leave you with one more idea based on a song: He walks right through the middle of town, picks up a bus and throws it back down, Godzilla!

Seriously what could be better than a 1/350 Godzilla attack?

EDIT: I just checked, the Aoshima PF-02 Godzilla Figure is approximately 13cm tall. Compared to the original Japanese 1950’s Gojira film where Gojira is approximately 50m tall, this computes to about 1:385. As Godzilla’s height has changed numerous times over his film career, I think 13cm to your 1/350 ground units would do VERY nicely. There is also the Aoshima PF-SP04 Godzilla (2001) Limited Edition PLAfig Model Kit version, also 13cm, though molded differently with some clear molded parts so you can show his dorsal plates glowing.

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@dunniteowl

I’ll skip most of those Iraqi/Afghanistan ideas. Not my cup of tea so to speak.
Eventually, I’ll think of something. But right now, I’ve got plenty of other model projects on my plate to finish before I get to wondering what to do with all those 1/350 scale armor vehicles.