M-113 bodging - part 3

While the PVA was drying earlier, cut out the various hatches and so on from balsa or mdf. It’s important to not get carried away with details but to add the significant bits. I add the trim vane on the front, the drivers and commanders round hatches, two engine grilles, the main compartment roof hatch and the rear door, the latter with its characteristic ‘cut corner’.

Again, leave the PVA to dry. The erratic quality control on my production line is evident from the varying angles of the front plates....

M-113 bodging - batch 2, part 2

The 2-inch thick insulation board is then cut into M-113-size blocks. 

Then it’s marked up for cutting to (more or less) shape. Don’t worry about the details - just go for the most obvious features.  So the slope of the front plate is cut first, then the ‘corner’ trimmed off below. At the rear, the main slope is cut in from the top to the track guards. The area between the track guards is then cut out. 

I solved the problem of the wheels and tracks by finding a side-on view of an M-113 on the internet, scaling it to 1/48 scale using MS Publisher (I expect it could be done in MS Word too) and then ‘mirrored’. I printed the results on to 100gsm white card and having trimmed them to shape, glued them to the body with PVA.

Leave to dry overnight. 

M-113 bodging - batch 2, part 1

 The recent Return to Golan game reminded me that I needed to address my shortage of M-113 APCs.

I therefore built a batch of ten - six in generic olive green and four more for my Israelis. Here are a couple of the completed models. These are 1/48 scale (more or less) for Little Cold Wars games. I’ll cover the build process in the next couple of posts.

The starting point. A slab of 2-inch insulation board is cut into chunks each the length of 2 M-113. 

Return to Golan

I know it’s been a bit quite in terms of posts but I’ve not been completely idle. As well as more COW photos still to come there’s days two and three of the Golan Heights game, continuing from where we left off last year. 
Here are a couple of photos to be going on with.