Israel Defence Forces M247 DIVADS

[Scratchbuilder]

Love your conception of mating two or three kits into one.
The trouble with the loss of the M247 was that the world went missile mad, like the 120mm anti-tank gun I used, replaced it with a missile of some description, all well and good when fired on a range, but in the hands of a squaddie, shivvering with the cold, soaking wet, having slept in a trench/dugout all night, then to manhandle the launcher - the miss rate was a 1 in 3 hit rate. Whereas with the 120mm if the sighting round hit the main armament followed, if you were cold or not. And I watched some of these fly by wire launches that would have made NASA proud. Gravity tended to reclaim what was meant to fly horizontal.
I noticed the height of the final drives were the same, but the centre hubs were different heights, will you be packing them up to match the Takom offerings.
And to further add to your IDF idea will you be adding the ball and chain anti RPG around the base of the turret as that turret looks very vulnerable. I am sure I have spares from my Merkave kits you can have.
But an interesting project and thought provoking one and of course I will follow with great interest.

[Guest]

Love your conception of mating two or three kits into one.

You’ll love the ideas I’ve got for another one, then: this kit’s hull plus a Takom Gepard turret plus a Perfect Scale PRTL conversion set to make the DIVAD vehicle the US Army could have had

The trouble with the loss of the M247 was that the world went missile mad

The American solution to almost any problem is more technology. There’s plenty of applications where that is indeed the best solution, but they also do it when, say, better training would be just as effective.

And I watched some of these fly by wire launches that would have made NASA proud. Gravity tended to reclaim what was meant to fly horizontal.

M47 Dragon ATGMs are always a good one in that respect. Supported by a bipod at the front but the firer’s shoulder at the rear, and the guidance system is attached to the tube. So … on firing, the missile’s weight is suddenly taken off that shoulder, so it goes up — and if the firer breathes in and out, his shoulder moves up and down. The missile’s trajectory follows nicely along in the opposite direction Quite a number apparently plowed into the terrain because of that, even if the firer supposedly just had to keep the crosshairs on the target until the missile hit.

I noticed the height of the final drives were the same, but the centre hubs were different heights, will you be packing them up to match the Takom offerings.

That smaller hub is exactly why I need to use the Meng final drives: so the sprocket will be at the right distance from the hull to fit the Merkava track from the Meng Magach kit. If I had used the Takom final drives, the sprockets would be spaced out too far from it.

And to further add to your IDF idea will you be adding the ball and chain anti RPG around the base of the turret as that turret looks very vulnerable. I am sure I have spares from my Merkave kits you can have.

Good idea, one I hadn’t thought of, and thanks for the offer However, having thought about it now that you’ve mentioned it, I don’t think I want to add them. Merkavas need it because of the huge rear overhang of the turret, while the M247 overhangs only a bit, nowhere near as far as on the M60 or even the M48, and the Israelis didn’t add chain armour on those either.

an interesting project and thought provoking one and of course I will follow with great interest.

Nice, I hope you’ll like whatever it turns out to be (which I’m not yet sure of myself at this time ).

For now it’s basically a standard M247 still, and I’ve gotten to the suspension:

[ATTACH]501558[/ATTACH]

All of it is fully working. Here the idler mount and front two roadwheel arms:

[ATTACH]501559[/ATTACH]

The arms are just stuck on the torsion bars without glue here, they’re tight enough that they don’t fall off. The shock absorbers work due to being in two pieces, and the idler arm also moves back and forth via the linkage to the front roadwheel arm. If you glue the arms carefully to the torsion bars, you can keep it all working, too.

But I want it to be fixed, and they don’t quite line up properly on their own accord. I first stuck the hull to a pane of glass with some Blu-Tack, then carefully levelled it. I could then press the roadwheel arms down against the pane of glass and flow liquid cement into the joins. However, to prevent them coming back up, I still had to employ a ruler:

[ATTACH]501560[/ATTACH]

The tweezers just serve to weigh the ruler down so the arms stay lined up.

Notice also that I didn’t glue the front roadwheel arm and the idler mount yet. The front arm is longer than the other five, so just pushing it against the glass would result in it sitting too high. Once the glue has dried on the rear five arms, I’ll use the ruler to line up the front arms too and glue them down.

[minitnkr]

Love the Gephard turret idea. Would have been my recommendation back then.

[JR]

Ooh, :smiling3: Neat work there with the different parts being used.

[Guest]

Love the Gephard turret idea. Would have been my recommendation back then.

It was one of the proposals submitted for the DIVAD, but not taken up by the US Army. In retrospect, it seems like probably the worst decision in the whole programme, given how successful Gepard and PRTL turned out to be. But expensive, of course — off the top of my head, one Gepard cost about the same as two or three Leopard 1s. But even though they’re 40+ years old now (plus 1990s upgrades), they have proved effective:

[Guest]

The hull is now almost completely built per the instructions:

[ATTACH]501613[/ATTACH][ATTACH]501614[/ATTACH]

The only things missing are the wheels and track, the air cleaners (which go in the empty spaces on the mudguards) and a few other bits that I think the Israelis would have removed or fitted elsewhere. The air cleaners in the kit are the later top-loading type, that was also used on the M48A5 and M60A3, but going by photos, the Israelis seem to have kept using the older, side-loading type from the M48A3, M60 and M60A1 (and which they also fitted to their Centurions). So now I need to either modify the kit parts, or find acceptable side-loading ones somewhere.

When building this kit, and presumably Takom’s M48A3 and -A5, beware that the supports for the mudguards are all a very tight fit. Most will want to go in eventually with careful pressure and liquid cement, but both H13s (the ones behind the air cleaners) still won’t. The slots for them are simply too narrow, which is a bit odd because H12 (in front of the air cleaners) looks to be exactly the same as H13 but will fit in its own location — but also not in that of H13. I widened the slots on one mudguard by scraping with a knife, while on the other side, I filed down the tabs on H13 slightly. Both methods work, but filing was much quicker and easier, so I would recommend that.

[Guest]

In my Patton spares box, I found side-loading air cleaners from the Tamiya M60A3 kit I built around the turn of the century, because that kit also has the newer top-loading ones you’re supposed to use instead. These may be crude by modern standards, but the basic shape is good. After sawing off the lumps that represent the inlet pipes and filing the front faces flat, I detailled them with plastic card, rod, strip, and punched bolts:

[ATTACH]501663[/ATTACH]

I also rebuilt the hinges, because the parts have them the wrong way around. For reference, I used this picture I took in 2000 of the M103A2 heavy tank in Bovington:

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Attached to the model:

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All I needed to do here was remove the rear locating ridges.

I also started on the turret:

[ATTACH]501665[/ATTACH]

I’ve said it before, and Takom does it again here: they want you to fit all kinds of small bits to large parts before adding those large parts together. Therefore, I immediately deviated from the suggested sequence

Incidentally, in step 29, Takom says to put part R13 between the lower turret part and the elevating bit. This is a travel lock, and if you want the guns movable, fit R13 downward instead, so it fits into lug R9 that’s installed in step 27.

[Guest]

Until yesterday, I had never realised that the M247’s turret had a rear door for the gunner. However, I figure that it would get rather in the way for putting external stowage on the vehicle, so perhaps the Israelis would have modified the turret by welding up the door and putting a roof hatch in.

[ATTACH]501680[/ATTACH]

The hatch is a leftover from a Hobby Boss M706 Commando armoured car kit, where it was unused. I had to file it down a bit so it wouldn’t look like it’s just completely on top of the turret. I copied the door shape onto 0.5 mm plastic card, as this was simpler than taking all of the details off the door and filling the hole for a vision block in the middle of it.

I also had to get the left rear periscope by the commander’s hatch out, because with the hatch in place it wouldn’t have much of a field of view. That was fun, I ended up wiggling it back and forth for quite a while until the glue finally gave way. I then fitted it back in from below, but upside-down so that more of it sticks up above the turret roof.

[Scratchbuilder]

More and more, this is getting exciting.... How about a stoeage cage on the rear of the turret, hence the welded up gunners hatch...

[Guest]

That is precisely the intention, yes The M247 has this very obvious shelf right under the door:

[ATTACH]501683[/ATTACH]

I would be highly surprised if crews didn’t want to use that for stowage. As it was, though, all that was on there is those two laundry baskets that appear to have held 7.62 mm ammo cans, two side-by-side, and probably two layers, in each.¹ But weld up the door and put some bars across …

¹ Which in itself makes you wonder: there was one M60 machine gun on the vehicle, yet it had three of these baskets, so that would be twelve plus one (on the gun) is thirteen boxes of machine-gun ammo. How much shooting were they expecting the commander to be doing with that M60?

[stillp]

Maybe there was a special offer on 7.62 ammo?
Pete

[Guest]

The US Army always had an obsession with machine guns — I mean, count the number of them on this M2 medium:

[ATTACH]501721[/ATTACH]

Maybe the large number of ammo boxes on the M247 was just the early-1980s manifestation of that

[Andy the Sheep]

Maybe Police Officer Eugene Tackleberry was at the head of the projects... :tongue-out3:

A nice and interesting "what if" project, Jakko.

[Guest]

I had to look up who that is, as the name rings a bell but I couldn’t place it. Now I did, yes, maybe he was. It seems to fit right in with the story of the real M247, anyway

I’ve been removing track links from the sprues. This is all 245 links Meng gives you, and their track pins:

[ATTACH]501810[/ATTACH]

Not cleaned up yet — I still need to remove four attachment points per link …

And some progress on the turret:

[ATTACH]501811[/ATTACH][ATTACH]501812[/ATTACH]

The radars are still loose, so they don’t get in the way too much. I’ll add their covers after spraying the model, as IRL these are usually not to be painted, so to make it easier I’ll just paint them separately and add them afterward.

The filler is where I filled the locating holes for the American smoke grenade launchers and one of the ammo boxes for them. I’ll be installing Israeli ones instead, so these had to go.

[JR]

Any help you need on those tracks just say