FORD M151 MUTT WALKAROUND

It was first fielded as a prototype & then two years later as the XM151. By 1959 the vehicle had been called up for service. The Ford Motor Company began mass manufacture in 1960.

The Mutt served in the US Army, Marines & Air Force & at one stage 18,000 M151s were being produced each year. It was widely exported & also produced as numerous other variants including the M107, M108 & M825 - equipped with the TOW missile launcher.

Powered by an L-142 four-cylinder liquid-cooled OHV petrol engine. It developed 72bhp at 4000rpm & the vehicle had a range of over 400km. It boasted four forward & one reverse gears, selected through a manual gearbox.

The Mutt had a low ground clearance – as low as .21m on some versions - but the vehicle was still famously unstable & prone to flipping over. In fact, drivers were ordered to limit their speeds to avoid accidents. Unlike its World War Two predecessor, this utility vehicle was not considered a success but rather an expensive failure.

Nevertheless, one user was the Israeli army who deployed the vehicle throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. They often armed the vehicle heavily with two 7.62mm FN MAG machine guns on pintle mounts.

It was whilst making a plastic model of an Israeli M151 that we came across a real Mutt at Duxford in 2008. So here are some of our reference shots that we used to detail our model as well as the finished item.