Bärgningsbandvagn 81 by Markus Eriksson

Bärgningsbandvagn 81, built by Markus Eriksson
It’s now close to 7 years since I went through the military service on an ARV attached to the Mechanized Brigade ”Mek B18”(today P18 on Gotland) Ever since, my ambition have been to build a replica of the vehicle on which I served. Our crew baptized this ARV (810) ”Tracy Lord”, a name very familiar to a bunch of 19-year olds…..On my company (Lärbo) there was another ARV (915) named after the other extreme as ”Virgin”. My ARV was in military vocabulary refereed to as FD1 and the other as FD2.
In 1999 Accurate Armour released their Centurion ARV Mk2, #K82. So, now there was no excuse to postpone this project any further, even though I still had to do a fair amount of scratchbuilding. Reference material for the colour scheme was mainly my memory but also the odd photograph. Another great source for technical data was the users manual of the ”Bgbv81C”.
Material used for the conversions was plasticard, caviar tube, brass/ aluminum/ copper wire and Milliput. Furthermore I plundered kits from Tamiya, Italeri and Academy. PE originates both from Aber and Eduard. The tracks are Fruilmodel. The model was painted using Humbrol Enamels and weathering was finished using Humbrol, oils and pastels. The decals are Archer Fine Transfer. Some marking had to be custom made and I did this using CAD and a laser printer.
All figures are conversions from a number of figure sets, ie Hornet, Warrior, Tamiya and Royal Models with assistance of the trusty Milliput and Caviar tube. I used the same mediums when painting the figures plus some Andrea paints.