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Truly amazing work, getting all of those suspension parts cut out and remounted accurately must have been a bit of a nightmare.

Hi,

wibblywobbly wrote:Truly amazing work, getting all of those suspension parts cut out and remounted accurately must have been a bit of a nightmare.

Thank you, no, it was prretty smooth actually, no real issues. Well..., I had to put myself in the right mindset first. The transplantation was a success in the context that i was looking for a cheap solution for a model that will see light use. For less than $100 with a free shipping deal, the HL Leopard 2A6 hull provided the road wheels, suspension, sprockets, Idler units, tracks, gearbox, speaker, return roller shafts, smoke unit and also a good 2.4 control board that will be reused elsewhere. I am trying to keep total costs under $500 for this model, not including the TK-60 that i plan to reuse for future builds. It would have been real easy to order another $500 of various stuff, mostly metal parts that would have been more complicated to modify for such build. Everything is custom so I need to use my head more than the wallet on this one. Building it was the kind of trouble was looking for...

Regards, Louis

Hi,

Continuing with the hull and starting the interior.

In order to find additional reference and more interesting material, i searched Google with search strings in German which pops up a lots of websites that were not coming up before. Found a site where one guy is restoring a Marder, he removed everything and it provided quite valuable photographic material on the interior shell.

The Marder interior is quite complex, narrow and low. Armed infantry have to come out on their 4 legs...
This is the rear on the vehicle with the ramp installed. There are still many things to recreate. At this time, I am just working on the core components or the easy stuff. Those ramp hinges took a long time to repro..
The Ludwig kit only provide the main plate for the ramp, everything else needs to be scratch built. On the Marder 1A1 and 1A2, the thick storage compartment on the ramp is on the inside. On the Marder 1A3+, it was moved to the outside to free up space for the legs of the soldier on the back seat.
The floor of the fighting compartment has been built. The plan is to create an interior that goes in a decreasing level of detailing as the eye moves towards the interior. It is unthinkable and unnecessary to recreate a perfectly detailed turret basket and all its electronics, it would not be seen and it would take way too much effort and time. So I intent on creating a basic basket and it is still undetermined if I can make it to rotate with the turret or remain static.
Here you see the created compartment floor without the tread plates that will be added later, on the sides are the covers for the suspension arms and the elevated stand at the back for the turret basket. I have no blue prints so I have to create and position everything based on my interpretations of few pictures from various angles. The interior is created on a best effort basis. The goal is to see something interesting when the rear ramp opens. Interior lighting will be provided. I do not intent on creating any soldiers on the seats, just a commander sticking out of the turret hatch.
The front section is spacious and all the electronics and battery can still fit in, except maybe the smoker that I always dislike and never turn on. This is a big vehicle, just a bit smaller than a Leopard 2, and a big 13cm longer than a M113, wider too.
The next step is to create the rear ramp servo mechanism. It is annoying to have the ramp opening every time I moved the vehicle so this will be useful at this time. From my experience with the M113, it is also very important to pre-wire all the cables needed at the back before adding items to the fighting compartment.

Regards, Louis

WOW Louis!

Another extraordinary build! Your handling of the Ludwig kits is truly impressive. I have the Centurion and M48 and hope I can do them justice.

The time line associated with your builds makes me ask; do you build full time?

Barry

Hi, well thank you Barry!

BarryC wrote:The time line associated with your builds makes me ask; do you build full time?

No, my day job is in the way... I am an IT consultant so modelling is a way to keep my sanity on building something tangible, where I am the sponsor, project manager, analyst, developer... and no conference calls. Its winter and my son is grown up so I have more time than before. I probably put in 10 hours on weekends and 2-3 hours at night. Keeps me off the TV and internet.

Thanks, Louis

Hi,

This post is showing the ramp servo installation and the interior rear bulkheads.

This is the mechanism that needs to be replicated as best as possible.
It took 30 minutes but I managed to find the best position for the servo, in a way that it lowers and raises the ramp to the maximum extent of the servo arm.
The presence of the rear bulkhead is ideal to hide the servo and it actually closely resembles the real mechanism in more than one way. It will of course look better once painted like the wall.
Those rear bulkheads have tricky shapes, corners and angles. And they are extending at the top in order to cover the grills on the rooftop, as seen on pictures.
I like modelling AFV with interiors. It makes me learn a lot about a vehicle and I can model stuff that I have not seen before, which is what I am looking for at this stage in my modelling "career".
Next step is to move forward into the hull interior.

Regards, Louis

Hi,

Continuing with the interior

This is the general interior view I am looking for when the rear ramp will open, although my interior will not get so detailed. The complexity is intimidating. The M113 interior for comparison was so simple. It takes quite a bit of analysis to figure out the general layout of the interior and the various areas, equipment, metal plates and braces sticking out in all directions. The method is to take one item at a time.
This is a close up of a Marder gun ports (right side from the rear), with Uzi sub marchine gun. Details on these are difficult to find because they were deleted from more recent Marder versions.
The gun ports were added first in order to ensure their accurate placement in regards to the rest of the interior. I initially took measurement and positions from my 1/35 Tamiya kit but the Ludwigs parts are bigger than scale so I had to make some adjustments to represent a realistic distance between the 2 ports. The wiring of the ramp servo is positioned to mimic actual wiring of the Marder interior. The connector for the cable extension on the right compartment will be hidden behind the radio.
It may not look like much but those braces on each sides took me a long time to build. They are an important feature of the interior and i tried my best to show them as they appeared to me in pictures.
Wires for the tail lamps and interior lights were pre-installed in preparation for future use.
The wire on the front right will be hidden behind some machinery next to the turret basket.
The interior was build primarily to be seen from the ramp but It also looks ok from the front as I want it to be generally accurate to a certain level because it can be seen when the top is lifted.
Next step is to build the central seating module.

Regards, Louis

Hi,

Here is the central seating module.

I am grateful to Geronimo at http://www.multi-board.com/board/index. ... /?pageNo=3 who listed pictures of his Marder under restoration. Looking at the disassembled interior, it was really helpful for the analysis. Although it is a 1A3 version, i can see that it is a modernized model of an earlier version and the seat arrangement has not changed. Also see interior pictures at http://www.simplissimo.de/kompanie/html ... nen_9.html

I was amazed to see that the fuel tank is within the central seating module. The infantry is actually sitting on top of 652 litres of Diesel fuel. I can imagine this being an issue for soldiers thinking about mines and IED. I was also surprised to see that although the seats can be made to fold (to normally facilitate the exit), there are fixed bins with equipment under the seats, rendering the seat folding somewhat useless in my view. I will need to build these bins as well. Notice the turret basked in the background.
These are the components required.
The building has started. Dimensions and size were visually extrapolated the best I could from available pictures. At first, I wanted the seats to fold and I made hinges for them, but it became complicated later on and i just glued them down to speed up the building. The bins under the seats are not that great looking...better to keep the seat down.
This is the completed central module. It took 8 hours to build. It required a lot of analysis of pictures to get a sense of its shape and size. I tried my best to be as close as possible with the time that I decided to allocate to it.
And here is the view from the rear ramp with the unit temporarily placed where it will be fixed later. I think the interior will look good and realistic once I put on the other details, tread plates, bins, periscopes, etc.
Other views. I was anxious to get this component done with and move on to something more exciting to build.
Next step is to take some rest...

Regards, Louis

Simply awesome Louis, you are the man!

Barry

Amazing work