Back in 1990 I was in the Australian Army in Brisbane, and my model stash in my dingy little barrack room consisted of a Tamiya Centurion MkIII, an Italeri Leopard 1A4 and the Tamiya "M113 FSV".
Turns out that none of them vaguely represented an Australian vehicle. While this was frustrating, these ancient kits also laid the basis for some research and scratch building skills.
That Tamiya Cent finally got finished as an Aussie 5/1 and still sits on my shelf (the AFV Club Cents blow it away, but I thought the Tamiya project was a damn fine effort on my part), The Leopard has been close to paint for more than 10 years and the FSV gathered dust as a hulk before I finally scrapped the project last year - keeping the turret and driver's hatch in the spares box.
Although the FSV was not a "bad" kit, it suffered from being based on the iconic but ancient Tamiya M113 - apart from all its inherent flaws as a basic M113/A1, it had the wrong trim vane for the Aussie FSV, no belly or sponson armour (although belly armour was only fitted to vehicles in Vietnam, and pre 1968 vehicle had no armour at all) and the top plate bore absolutely no resemblance to the real thing (to be fair, there were only 16 of these vehicles made, and reference material would have been very thin on the ground in the 1980s).
I have been on a bit of an Aussie M113A1 building burst (yeah, I know ... the projects will start to lurch forward again once paint goes on), so when I saw Mouse House's FSV upgrade I thought "I reckon that will go together pretty quickly"
.Apart from the fact I had the turret and hatch languishing in the spares box, the subject was Australian and Vietnam era, which bought two of my favorite genres together.
I started with the belly and sponson armour (Mouse House offers two versions - one with cut out for the Tamiya arms and the other without for the Academy kits). I follwed the instructions by gluing the front first and progressively working toawrds the rear. Regards the Sponson armour, it was supposed to protect the area above the first three road wheels, which were naturally most likely to trigger mines, so I used the wheels as reference points.
Once the hinges for the ramp were in place, I filled the holes and sanded them smooth:
Moving on to the hull top, the plate dropped in perfectly, although I did need to shim the corners because of my dodgy sanding. I had a base interior in the spares box, which I fitted primarily to fill the driver's hole. I find that correctly proportioned trim vanes sit too low, so I generally fill the location holes and mount the bottom on the vane level with the bottom lip of the engine access hatch.
Although not well known, the Tamiya and Academy hulls suffer (from among other things) from the rear guards being too high ... this means that the Tamiya Jerries are "squashed", and when correctly proportioned items are fitted they naturally sit too high. I lower the guards to about the level of the bottom of the filled location holes and glue in a fillet before sanding the arches to shape.
Anyway, there is such a thing as too much information, so I'll let this build log rest here and add another instalment in a day or two ...
