RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

The right panel has storage room for no less than sixteen 7.62mm ammo boxes.
I could not leave these empty so i purchase 4 sets of Special Ops 7.62 ammo boxes, a significant expense.
The racks were easily made in plasticard.
The finished ammo racks ready for install. I am giving it the honour of a full load of ammo.
Overview of the right panel. You can see the 7.62mm ammo racks and the battery box. The purpose of the mysterious box between the two is unknown, but as it it located next to the battery, it is likely electrical in nature.
Below the turret is a ammo storage rack for twenty seven 76mm rounds for the main gun. Its inclined towards the front. Picking ammo from this storage unit required the turret crew to exit the turret.
The module is made of plasticard. The ammo rounds will be represented by the bottom of the shell made up of brass washer. These will be installed after painting. Calculations were made to represent the 27 rounds.
The ammo rack is temporarily installed under the turret for the fit. It will be installed after painting and after the wiring for the turret are all in place.

Overview of the interior with the lighting, always a favorite sight for me.
With roof and turret in place.
There are still a few more items to add such as the turret base rollers and the gun cleaning rods but the interior core is there. Surprisingly, there are no seating in the rear section.
A grill on the roof connected to a ventilation duct going towards the front is to push out the gun smoke from the turret gun breech, which is toxic.
Regards, Louis

This is so awesome! Beautiful detail work and I’m sure sure your wiring will be clean as a whistle.

Hi,
I started to complete the upper hull.

The MRV has a different drive hatch than regular M-113. It has a complicated mechanism that is a challenge to reproduce. Because of the turret above, it needs to open horizontally after being raised a few inches. I wanted a opening hatch so i had to compromise on a couple of areas to make this work in scratch.
Frontal view with the scratch built periscopes and guards.
The strange custom opening hinge and the locking mechanism on the right gave me trouble recreating them from the single picture i had. They are not really accurate but they have some resemblance. This is a good as it is going to be with the 3 hours i wanted to spend on the driver's hatch. But someone very meticulous and with the right material and tools can have a lot of fun making them work fully like the real one.
Something did not add up in my calculations for the height of the bracket and I was obviously missing information that would have allowed me to complete it correctly. I had to adjust the height so that the hatch stay horizontal.
The fuel cap on the right is a Mato M10 fuel cap in metal.
Next steps will be to build the flotation kit. The turret exterior also needs all its detailing.
Regards, Louis

Ye gods and little fishes. Is there no limit to your skills? Absolutely stunning work. I am not sure whether I am inspired to try harder or totally demoralised with the realisation of how limited my own skills are.

Hi,

Here is the flotation kit.

To help keep the M113 MRV amphibious because of the heavy turret, it is equipped with a flotation kit on the trim vane and on both sides. These modules are made of light skin metal with foam inside. These do not offer any extra armor protection except maybe in potentially detonating an RPG round before hitting the main armor.

The trim vane flotation device is full width. It is lowered when the M113 dips into water, helping keeping the nose up before the vehicle stabilizes.
The side flotation kit is made of 3 sections bolted to the armor.
The trim vane as many angles. The AFV Club 1/35 model is used as main reference to reproduce it in 1/16.
These are the side flotation modules under construction. It seems easier than it was, the front module needed a lot of attention to get it right.
And here is the M113 MRV with its flotation kit installed. Its really starting to look like an MRV.
Regards, Louis

What they said !

Fantastic work Louis!

Barry

Hi, thank you Barry and Herman

After a couple of week of vacations, its getting time to finish this thing.

Here are the side skirts.

Like any M113, the MRV is optionally equipped with its side skirts when on the field. They have different mounting arrangements, some have full size skirts, some shortened with cut mud guards, some not at all. The easy way out would be to skip building them but it is not my style.
Showing the structure of the skirts and of the front mud guard. The parts provided by Ludwigs are not useful because they are too basic, have shape and dimension issues. The whole thing needs to be fully scratch built with plasticard strips, 1/4 round and square rods, Meng and brass bolts.
The side skirts are completed in about 6 hours of work.
They are removable, they are held in place with 4 M1x6 brass bolts with M1.1 washers on mud guards at each extremities .
I gave the mud guards more thickness than they should in order to make them stronger.
It is important to accurately reproduce the shape of the mud guards in order to clear the tracks.
Here is the M113A1 MRV as it stand today. Next step is to complete the roof and exterior turret detailing.
Regards, Louis

Eastern Front wrote:This is a really cool build,,,not enough 113's out there is 1/16 scale..

Where will you put the battery?

Cheers!

"where will you put the battery"...............................jeez I hope that doesn't spark a "holy-S--t moment"