No, not olive green.
I received a bunch of Jaques Duquettes Bradley products last night which I’ll be using for a number of builds. When I took a hiatus from model building last month I still had quite a few builds of various genres in the queue, but I’m so anxious to try these products I’m going to start another two builds today. Both will be M2A1s, based on the Tamiya/Academy M2 kits, which are themselves a curious mix of M2 and M2A1 features. Nevertheless, they are the OG kits.
Usually I can throw one of these kits together in a day, even with improvements. But these will not be speed builds. Given the new parts, my goal is to build my best ever M2A1 Bradleys.
I’ll start with the lower hull. I may need to source one…
The first thing I do is correct the front suspension arms. They’re too short, at the wrong angle, and have no detail where they mount onto the hull. Why Tamiya did this I have no clue. At least if you decide to skip this step the front wheel is the right location with respect to the others. Sort of - the other thing they did was to make the supensions on either side mirror one another, which because of the torsions bars is incorrect. One side should be slightly forward of the other. I’m not fixing that. I’m not that crazy. Not yet
I’d guess to accommodate the mis-angled final drive which in turn may be related to accommodations made for motorization.
I gotta ask , how the heck did you end up with so many Bradly kits and an interior sprue that looks to be brown ?
I count at least 22 hulls in that first pic - it knocks my Sherman obsession into a cocked hat! Still, it’s not quite enough to build a model of each real Bradley that entered service…
I agree the first swing arm seems to be borked to make room for the motorization slot and sprocket, which of course are not realistic.
The final drives were almost a drop fit. They need a tiny bit of finessing. I recommend filing the hull opening rather than filing on the printed part. Thirty seconds of work, tops.
As you can see, the new final drives accomplish four things - they fill in the opening so you don’t have to; (including the sponson) they correct the angle of the final drive; the front housings are correctly sized; and finally, they have much better detail than the originals. These can dress up any Gen I or Gen II Tamiya or Academy kit.
I used to build kits as a job. Never again. Except for commissions, which pay ridiculously well.
Like Mark Twain said: “There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”
The brown sprues are the color of the interiors for the Academy kits. Tamiya did them in gray.
That doesn’t count the ones I’ve built for other folks, or the ones on the workbenches in several states of completion. Some I just use for spare parts, like the suspension arms.
The suspension is looking good. Jacque’s sets are really nice. They look great and really update the old Tamiya/Academy kits. I used them on my M6A3 Linebacker build and have another in the stash with a Tamiya M2 kit. Not sure what it will become though.
Almost any old (originally released before ca. 1990, at a rough guess) Academy kit is a straight copy of a Tamiya one, except they usually moved some of the parts around on the sprue. For example:
I almost forgot - another reason the front shocks don’t go on right (either scratched or the new 3D parts) is because all three of the return roller mounts are in the wrong position and need to be removed. I can’t get my wide chisel blade in well enough to finish the job so I’ll need to trim it a little with an angle grinder. I don’t think I trust myself with an angle grinder just yet. As it is, my left is okay. My right is like a little T Rex arm protruding from my body. I can grasp with it but can’t really move it. Don’t want to cut it off accidentally no matter how useless it is. So I’ve moved on to something not requiring power tools.
I worked on the trim vane, I drilled the little holes in it and replaced the torsion bar with square profile Evergreen. Still needs a few bolt heads here and there.
That’s something I’ve also wondered about sometimes, but maybe the answer is simply that this would have been impossible for Tamiya to do in practice in 1980s South Korea?
I do know that when I needed the tracks from a Tamiya M10 tank destroyer kit around 1990, because it was the only source of T48 Sherman tracks at the time, this was very difficult. The Tamiya M10 was long out of production, and I had never heard of Academy, but somebody tipped me that there was a shop in this country selling the Academy version of it. I phoned them up, and when I asked about it, the voice on the other side said, “Where did you get this information?” as if I was trying to buy drugs or something When I named the person who told me, the guy from the shop was reassured and did want to sell an Academy M10 to me. I surmised that Academy kits were not allowed to be sold openly, probably because the Tamiya importer would have brought legal action or something.
Now is as good a time to mention the difference in the kits. Some say the Tamiya kit is better. I’m here to tell you, looking at both kits side by side, they’re the same. The only difference quality wise is that the knock out circles are a little deeper on some of the Academy parts. You have to fix them on either kit anyway so no big deal.
Because a pantograph was used to make the Academy molds you would expect them to be identical, but they’re not. Underneath the floor of the interior is a row of rings. The rings are slightly larger on the Academy kit - probably so they can point to them and say, “See, we didn’t copy the kit, these are different.” They’re not visible when the kit is built. So why are the rings even there?
Well, that’s one of the things Tamiya left off of the kit - the small circular rings welded to the hull. These were pockets for some of the supports for the swim barrier. My theory (and I’ve never seen anyone mention this ever, so I could be wrong) is that the rings underneath the floor were meant to be shaved off and added to the hull. Tamiya’s design engineers forgot to tell the art department this, so it never showed up in the instructions,. I’m certain that’s why they’re there, and I use them as such. They’re just the right size, are there are almost exactly enough to do the job. Academy didn’t know why they were there, but chose to make them a tad larger.
Interesting, never noticed the rings, but they could possibly work for the fording screen mounts, but they would still be missing quite a bit of the other doodads that go with it
I think I’ll go with the tan one.
When I named the person who told me, the guy from the shop was reassured and did want to sell an Academy M10 to me. I surmised that Academy kits were not allowed to be sold openly, probably because the Tamiya importer would have brought legal action or something.
