One of the two Australian Army Weasels recovered

[Snowy]

Recent progress on the rebuild of ARN 139999, the only surviving WWII Australian Army Weasel.

John has sliced the top and back of the dead M29C hull off. This piece contains the centre bulkhead and the cockpit coaming edge which is rolled (wired) and not trivial to reproduce in the short time we have left before the Bundy Swim-In in June.

He has finished scratchbulding the new sponsons and has started grafting them to the upper hull piece. I was wrong when I mentioned there are a dozen types of hat channel - there are at last count fourteen styles. We had new reproduction fuel tanks made by a master fuel tank builder in Adelaide who normally does WWII jeep tanks. We imported the remains of a very rusted Weasel tank from the USA as a pattern for him to use. These repro tanks are absolutely perfect and a credit to the builder. A bloke in Sweden supplied us with some NOS Weasel fuel level senders to top it off.

John has been doing all the major hull rebuild work so I've been helping out with getting a repro exhaust pipe made up, and I also rebuilt the steering lever assembly. I managed to get a complete unit out of the remains of three very cactus ones.

Here are some pics. For more see http://202.63.50.228/gallery2/main.p...g2_itemId=3168