Amphibious Jeep - Murrells Models

I purchased this partly completed kit in January 2025. It’s quite old certainly not in production any more. With a fiberglass hull & deck, there were a few odd accessories with it but not much.

The wheels, axels, transfer case and motor had been installed but not the propeller, it’s shaft or motor. The suspension was supposed to be leaf spring (made of plastic) but the front leafs had been replaced with solid material and the back leafs had collapsed, so I added a pair of coil sprung dampers in the rear wheel arches to support the weight.

Driving it around I found the motor/gearbox combination to be too highly geared at 11:1 and it didn’t have enough power, so I changed the motor to an MFA 919D with a 30:1 gearbox, this works OK using a 11.4v LiPo battery. Do not expect this model to be a ‘rock crawler’ due to it’s weight the gear train is at it’s limit and can fail if over stretched. I had to replace both front & rear prop shafts with metal ones as the plastic versions just split.

My model weights 13kg with 2 figures & battery. I have added 1.2kg of lead shot as ballast to bring the water line to the top of the wheel arches, as you can see in the videos below it looks about right.

The propeller was difficult to install as there wasn’t the room for a standard boat type propeller shaft, so I used 2 x 90 degree gearboxes from a model outboard motor and had the motor mounted behind the rear wheels. Using the parts here search for ‘Open Outboard Motor Mk.II’

Most of the detailing was 3D printed, a good source is 'Ford GPA Accessories'  and  'Front & Rear lights' , some parts had to be re-sized to fit my model.