MickeyMouse wrote:
Eric,
You should paint your camouflage and call it an army collectable.. Then you can get 3 times the money...
The vehicle he has looks pretty correct, but his biggest problem is that he's got no history to showing the pedigree or provenance of the vehicle. If it's a real Fast Attack Vehicle that came from the Army, then it's likely worth it to a collector. The problem is that I've seen several very good clones over the years and very few actual FAV's. The military dune buggies were built off of commercially available chassis's back in the day, so it's not hard to do one if you have the dedication. Like anything of historical value, if you don't have the papers, there's no way to prove the legitimacy. Very good clones typically sell for $10k or less. I saw one about 70% of the way to completion sell for under $3k in Idaho.
Make fun of someone for wanting a piece of history, but we all have our hobbies and some are willing to pay for it. Painting it camo and getting 3x the value doesn't work out that way. It's why you can build an M1D for $1000, but a legitimate one showing it's real (not a clone) sells for $5000 when they're auctioned off through the CMP. It's also why people buy a Willy's MB versus a CJ2 or an M38 over a CJ3 - it's all about what interests us.
I've got both a Chenowth Desert Patrol Vehicle (3 seats, 124 made) and a Chenowth SEAL "Squad" Vehicle (6 seats, 12 made) and can prove the history and pedigree of both of them. In my case, these vehicles were free, but I've had several museums call offering very tempting offers on them. They're more fun than I'm willing to get rid of at the moment and they might be handy to have around for retirement or the kids college fund one day.