Alrighty. I have an old Tamiya M247 Sgt York that I am currently rebuilding. A number of parts were knocked off during its 20yr storage, and I think I have collected enough spare parts to fix’er up.
I am planning to paint it in desert MERDC, but in my research I discovered something I never noticed before about Sgt Yorks in general. The Tamiya kit comes with a kind of “ramp” shaped object with a box on top, located on the engine deck, which I had assumed existed on the actual vehicle as some type of thermal cover to reduce its heat signature. However, on most of the actual vehicles which I was researching for painting details, I noticed that the rear of these Sgt. Yorks have been extended. The original louvered exhaust doors are boxed in. The engine deck appears to be extended rearwards and a new exhaust louver is located above the new set of engine access doors. I assume this was done to reduce the 247’s heat signature. And it looks like some of the other model manufacturers are using this style
What I’m wondering is, did Tamiya get this wrong? Did they just take a short cut and simply introduced the M247 with the rear end of the original M48 base vehicle? Or was this an actual component of the early M247s that was later reworked in a newer rear end, later in it’s existence?
If this “ramp” object was a standard feature at some point, I’ll just keep it. But I need to know if it wasn’t, as that means I’m gonna need to convert the rear area if I want to keep a Sgt York in my collection
I did and I didn’t I built the Tamiya kit straight from the box 25–30 years ago, and did have an Academy M247 in the stash that I wanted to correct, but sold to someone else as soon as I saw Takom announced theirs about two years ago.
And to accommodate the extra stuff the vehicle needed to carry to power its electronics and hydraulics.
Academy did, because they straight-up copied a lot of Tamiya’s kits in the ’80s. They moved parts around the sprue, but otherwise they’re generally 100% interchangeable.
Yes, very much so.
That’s exactly what they did. They took their M48A3 hull, made a few changes, like the M60-type headlights and that odd ramp on the engine deck, and called it a day. The turret is not bad, IIRC, but the hull is a shambles. It needs a whole new engine deck and hull rear, as well as a lot of other details.
Rather than updating your old model, I would recommend (assuming you have the budget) buying the Takom kit instead. It’s lightyears ahead of the Tamiya one. For one thing, it has the engine deck right
So that’s where it came from! So basically, the kit depicts a design/advertising drawing rather than the production vehicle — maybe even an early prototype? In any case, they still got the front and rear mudguards wrong by using early M48A3 ones instead of late A3 or standard A5 ones, though.
IIRC Tamiya based their turret on the wooden mock-up, and the eventual prototypes were slightly different. All the engine-deck mods developed over time, as the real thing had serious overheating issues that led to a range of different fixes. The Takom kit is based on preserved examples, so is much more accurate.
The original brief was to use M48A3 hulls, but this was upgraded to M48A5s by the time the prototypes were built. Tamiya just used what they had, figuring nobody would be too fussed…
I built the Tamiya kit straight from the box 25–30 years ago, and did have an Academy M247 in the stash that I wanted to correct, but sold to someone else as soon as I saw Takom announced theirs about two years ago.
