Hummers to Humvees - part 3

Hello,

in past week, I've done a bit more bits on the humvees and I've figured it's best to keep them in two posts, as there's "plenty" (okay, not that many) of smaller details added.

After rough shape of the hull and roof was done, I started working on the gun mount. While no rocket science, I've found it quite hard to approach to.
I've started by taking a look of (very limited) photos of the real thing. There is as many different hatches as there are different models of the vehicle.

I have dug out an old 1:72 plastic kit to have a look. They're really, really old and are part of my larger modelling "projects" - it has to be at least 10 years old now (oh, I'm so old), I've filled a tray with sand and put in two humvees (hard and open topped), a dingo, warrior and bradley IFVs, Abrams and Challenger 2 MBTs, fuchs APC and even a cute little Fennek reccee vehicle. My sister managed to step on it, so this one was painted black and put in the middle of the tray. Other vehicles were put all around to provide "all round defence". I had some 1/72 modern brits sprinkled around.  The painting on this particular vehicle is a bit crude, but...well...we try and we learn :D.

I have roughly compared my humvees to this one and to some miniatures and a .50 cal, then made some VERY rough estimations regarding the needed size of the hatches.

Now, unless you're building it, I suggest you skip this wall of text. It is a long text, filled with bunch of thoughts that I've been writing down while working on it, so I wouldn't forget it by now that I'm writing an actual post.

Hatch measurments:

1mm large circle, 8mm small circle. Draw a line over the middle of the small circle and add 2 mm. Make a perpendicular line on 2/3 (roughly 1cm in small circle). Draw another line, 6mm higher than centre line. That line gets crossed by perpendicular line on roughly 8mm distance. Mark at -1mm and slope the perpendicular line from 2mm higher line to 6mm higher line a bit (hard to explain, see the horrible photos)

I tried to cut the hatch out with a scalpel, to make a nice little turning hatch from it all. It doesn't work that way. So I cut out the hatch, figured I can make something else work for the basis. At this point, I've found out one hatch was drawn considerably larger, I got no idea what this was all about, but I've made them both smaller. I can tell you, if I do any other humvees, they're all gonna be different in the end. So I figured, I'll make those with gunshields only and any next conversion would be with all round protected turret, so I can just put "something" in for a hatch or even nothing, as back plate would hide the hatch.

I have also figured of the simple turning mechanism: a pin. With my luck, I've used the thinnest to poke the holes and a pin I only got one of. It is long enough so I'll probably just cut it in half.

This has taken all my modeling mojo for the day, so next day, I've started working on the base around the hatch. I've ROUGHLY put a hatch on the basic circle and draw rough lines. Then I've built the turning mount up with some milliput. As the hatches will be open, I've figured a very rough shape will do. Once  I'd put the gunners on (thats on my to sculpt/convert plan :P), nobody will be looking at the mounts anyway.

This is how far I've came when I took the last pictures of it. By now, I have built up the triangle piece, where the gun is mounted. I want to make guns detachable, so you can swap between nothing, three calibres of machine guns and an automatic grenade launcher (completely correct from our army's point of view, machineguns, but mostly .50 cal would be the best choice...but hey, it's a game and AGL could come useful!)

Let that be it for now, and I'll show you more next time. I have also remembered I might want some mirrors done, but so far, that would only be a wasted time for something that would break off pretty easily, I'm afraid.

Thanks for looking,
Mathyoo