I got the Tamiya HUMMER kit with the M242 Bushmaster and I am wondering if this vehicle was deployed to Desert Storm or OIF? Also what other vehicle would the Bushmaster gun been installed on? Thanks in advance.

Sorry Dave, it was an experimental vehicle and it never saw service.

The only thing that I know of that has the Bushmaster is the Bradley and the LAV.

Sorry, Dave. It was only a test vehicle with only 3 ever made. It was not accepted by the US Military for production. It was found that the frame of the HMMWV could not take the vibration and pressures of the 25mm and would crack. Also, the military didn't want an attack HMMWV at the time.

Thanks for the fast replies guys. I can use the HUMMER for another conversion gun truck and the bushmaster will go on an old LAV that I have. I might use the gun for the T2K campaign.Thanks again.

Hey Dave, just something to consider if you didn't know it already, but the basic HMMWV stuff for the Bushmaster kit is NOT the same as Tamiya's M1025 and M1046 releases. I believe the Bushmaster base Hummer is from the old Italeri/Esci/AMT version from back in the day.

Patrick is right about the lineage of the Tamiya Bushmaster HMMWV. It is an Italeri kit, but the Italeri series of HMMWVs is not the same as the Esci/AMT series of HMMWVs. I've got just about every HMMWV kit made. The Italeri-based kit was superior to the Esci kit, but the Esci kits did include a radio and radio rack. That was about the only benefit to the Esci kits back then.

I did an article about the Italeri-based HMMWVs a few years ago. They included kits reboxed by Tamiya, Testors and Revell of Germany. Italeri HMMWVs

I still have most of the Esci kits, mainly for nostalgic purposes.

What is interesting to note is that the Academy HMMWVs look an awful lot like the Italeri kits. So much so that I think they may have copied the "Tamiya" HMMWV like they did with many of the regular Tamiya kits that came out at the same time.

Of course the new Tamiya kits make all the other HMMWV kits relatively obsolete.

Thanks for the clarification Robin. I couldn't remember which kit the Bushmaster vehicle came from, but I definitely knew it was NOT a recent kit.