Modern Combat – Assembling the HUMVEE Convoy

Some things take up less space once they are assembled, so while sorting out items I came across the Humvee kits by Tamiya in 1/48th scale, and those would be a lot smaller when built. And it was a welcome diversion from sorting, taking pictures and dropping off parcels at the post office.

Tamiya doesn't call them HUMVEE but a more generic name, simply an 4x4 utility vehicle. I have a total of four boxes of these, three of the regular US Modern 4x4 Utility Vehicle and a fourth one as the Cargo Variant.

They use the same chassis but put the back seat is used for cargo, so they closed the area and gave it a different cover. Tamiya is quite clever when cutting the sprues and covering variants by adding or exchanging sprues, so they did here. There is another variant around covering a grenade launcher, along with a lot of third company accessoires for different purposes and details, for that reason I bought the resin upgrade sets by Black Dog back then.

But as the primary obective was to save space, I wanted to get the pieces from the sprues and reduce volume. Quickly I cut the space needed in half from four boxes to two. Just assembling the chassis and going for the variants later on.

And while preparing the resin kits, I remembered how pissed I was about the quality of those, especially at that price. So that much for my plan of diversion, as these will take quite some time of reworking and refitting. But more on that later.