David Herbert

It is possible that it has steel selector forks but even then I find it very surprising that an EP oil was specified in a gearbox in 1952. Obviously though, if that is what the manual says then that is what you should use. David

The point about not using an EP oil is that your box probably has bronze selector forks in it. EP additives eat into bronze and other yellow metals and the surface crumbles away. This is nothing to do with viscosity. I would expect that your box requires straight 50 or 90 viscosity gear oil but I haven't got a book on it. Going back to double clutching, it is entirely up to you to get the gears rotating at exactly the right speed so that they can engage. If you don't they simply won't go in and will do a lot of damage as they make that grating noise. Modern boxes do it for you, this one doesn't ! David

You say that you are having trouble changing down. Do you consider yourself experienced with crash boxes in trucks of this size ? If not I suggest that blipping the throttle 'a little to help things' is not going to speed up the intput shaft of the gearbox enough to make a difference. The idea of double declutching on a downchange is to spin up the input side of the gearbox so that it is going at the same speed as it will be after the next gear is engaged. As everything naturally slows down as soon as you disengage the clutch when in neutral, you need to blip the engine quite a bit higher than it will be going in the next gear. So, for down changes: 1 release throttle, press clutch, select neutral 2 Engage clutch, blip throttle to higher RPM than next gear will require. 3 Press clutch, engage next gear, open throttle, engage clutch. For up changes there is usually no need to double clutch, just pause in neutral while the input shaft slows down. As Richard says, you will find that both up and down shifts are much easier at lower revs. The engine has plenty of torque to keep you going. David

I regret to say that I agree with Ruxy. I did wonder if 'oseveno' is an anagram of anything but I think it's just random letters. He has not seen fit to comment on any of the very sensible answers so far so I agree that he is just winding us up. David

I love the comment at the very end - very much of its day ! David

I have no connection to and have never met William Suttie but I found his book to be packed with information that I find interesting and is also very well laid out and easy to read. I thoroughly recommend it if you have a technical interest in armoured vehicles. It is also not very expensive and easy to find on Ebay ! David

Relating to paragraph 2 of my post above, I have just checked and clicking on 'Mark this thread read' still opens the thread rather than deleting the 'unread posts' blue dot as it should. David

This FV432 is indeed one of the prototypes and is significantly different to the series production ones. Its registration is actually 216 BXR which is has always carried. It never had an army registration though the Pre-Production FV430s (with 'W' numbers) did have army registrations (from 03DA04 to 03DA30 I believe). It has resided at the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway near Edinburgh where that photo was taken but is being returned to Bovington. Once Fv432 production was established P4 went to FVRDE at Chertsey where it was used for experiments into hydrostatic steering transmissions and other projects. Amongst other details the running gear is directly taken from the last version of FV420, with narrower road wheels, lighter suspension arms and lighter sprockets. The rubber track pads are also smaller than FV430 series. The yellow stripe was simply to make it more visible in the camp and on the test track. The armoured engine louvres were replaced by wire mesh and the perspex cupola was added to give a little driver comfort. There is a photo of it in William Suttie's excellent book 'The Tank Factory' which is a history of Chertsey. David

My personal opinion is that wheel nuts should be lubricated so that the tightening force is used to clamp the wheel onto the hub, not to twist the stud. I have never had a greased nut come loose but have had rusted ones which had worn the countersink in the wheel because they could not be tightened into it properly. On any vehicle I always put a smear of grease on both the thread and the contact surface on the back of the nut and then tighten them good and tight by hand. Richard has provided torque figures but these are meaningless if the threads are rusted. I agree that if the threads are rusty the nuts won't actually undo but that doesn't mean that the wheel is being clamped against the hub properly. David

25HP seems very low for any version of a Ford V8 engine ? I think that I would have wanted a much longer push bar on the mine exploder - say about 100m !

I am looking at HMVF on a PC running Linux Mint. I see quite a lot of minor changes to colours and text layout which I will presumably get used to but I note when I look at a thread that I have looked at before, there is now a line drawn across the page under the posts that I have already seen, thus highlighting those that have been added. Good idea ! I also find that, in the list of threads, if I hover the cursor over the title of a thread so that the preview window appears, if I then click on 'mark this thread read' button, instead of just deleting the green (or is it blue now ?) dot, it opens the thread which I think is not what should happen. I find it very frustrating when computers do not behave intuitively and when the 'updates' change things that worked perfectly well before - but then I am an old git ! Many thanks though to those that have been wrestling with the latest round of problems on behalf of the rest of us and indeed for the effort that goes into the general running of the site that most of us are completely unaware of. David

The track rod ends of my Range Rover are locked in exactly the same way. I have just had to change one for the second time so I was very glad that I had greased it all properly the first time ! David

Ian, I think you will find that the tires are actually polyurethane. This is usually supplied as a two part liquid that needs to be mixed together, de-gassed (bubbles removed in a vacuum chamber), and then poured into a mould. Most companies doing this sort of small numbers work make a very basic mould and then turn the required profile with a big lathe and a very sharp tool. Alternatively it is possible to make a mould out of, say, fibre glass which could enable an exact copy of an original tire, complete with writing, but of course the man hours add up then. Polyurethane is available in many different hardness's and toughness's and if you can get the right one it will far outlast natural rubber. this is what modern tank wheels are 'rubbered' with. David

Well done for filling in your location, it makes it much easier to advise. I think that losing three tires all on the same side was probably a fluke but it is possible that the first one lost its tire and that got between the horns and the other tires and pushed them out sideways but there is no way to tell. A classic mistake is to tow the tank without the tracks on and to try to turn it. That makes the wheels skid sideways and often rips the tires off. Please let us know how you get on as this is going to be a problem that many people will have. David

The problem is really the age of the rubber and the amount of use that it had already had. When you were in the field you would probably not have been doing the sustained speed that you did on the road and also the field would have been softer than the road, putting less of a washboard type load into the tires from the transition from link to link. As a stationary tire is loaded the rubber spreads in all directions and would recover to its original shape if the load was removed. However, when driving, the rubber in front of the contact point becomes the next bit to be loaded which has the effect of trying to push the rubber around the wheel in line with the direction of movement. With the addition of age and heat from the flexing and the weather it is not uncommon to lose rubber from what seemed to be perfectly good wheels. Any army tank depot will have piles of wheels with detached rubber waiting for re-rubbering. You may be able to find a company within reach that can re-rubber them or it is possible to do them yourself with polyurethane but you will need to make a mould and have a vacuum chamber to remove the bubbles. There are lots of videos on YouTube that could give you inspiration. I would strongly recommend polyurethane over natural rubber but it comes in many grades of both hardness (you need between 70 and 90 Shore A scale) and also toughness. You could have a look at the thread here of Jon Morris who is building a replica Pz2 from nothing and has just been rubbering his wheels. This is not a cheap process so if you can get some NOS spare wheels that could be more cost effective but you will certainly need some spares anyway. This is all part of the fun of tank ownership. Good luck. David

There are a number of very similar videos of it on YouTube. It is certainly restorable and not far from a range access road as can be seen on Google Earth. David

I would guess it is from a British 1930s light truck. The bigger manufacturers tended to make their own (particularly Ford) so that just leaves a couple of hundred possibilities. Someone will really need it but how do you find them ? David

Indeed ! Grover washers are heavier and have a grove in the outside edge. David

Or turn the link end for end but not upside down as I suggested earlier ! David

But they do have the benefit of professional management with degrees in museum management so they must be doing it right ! David

Or a bus ! David

Try removing the bar and replace it reversed end to end. I suspect that it will not bind up and it will give you more clearance. David

There are diaphragms in the carb that fail. Also ignition condensers need to be replaced with modern ones as even NOS original ones are doubtful after all this time. David

I have a figure of 90" = 2.29m for a WOT2E GS with it's cargo tilt in place. Remember that if the approach is not dead flat the vehicle will be at a similar angle until it has all four wheels in the garage. Also the door opening may be rather larger than the actual clearance under the open door. Extra height is also useful if you want to unload a modern van under cover or any number of other scenarios that only happen if the door is a bit too small. David

I think that the internal baffle is to deflect cold water being poured into an empty radiator from going down the pipe into the heads. Instead it tops up the radiator itself displacing hot water in the radiator into the cylinders via the water pump, hopefully reducing the risk of cracking a cylinder casting with thermal shock. Nice woodwork too ! David