Stone

Since the original question seems to have been answered, how about missile launchers? Most of them are fired electrically, but the phrase 'from which any shot, bullet or other missile can be discharged' springs to mind...

So, is it a firearm or not a firearm, and if so what FAC would it have to be held on, or instead how would you deactivate one?

Stone

Proper industrial Velcro should never fall off, it's incredibly strong for that sort of application (ie sticking a flat plane to another flat plane). I used to regularly stick heavy bits of IT kit to vertical surfaces inside rack cabinets and never had a problem, even with a metal plate it'd be sure to stay on. If anything I'd be worried I wouldn't be able to get them off again!

Stone

At 3.5t you can drive it on a normal car licence so it won't be an HGV. There are a wide range of categories to choose from depending on what it looks like - beware the difference between tax categories and registration categories as they're slightly different things. It may be easiest to describe and tax it as a Light Goods Vehicle.

Also beware in an LGV you're limited to 60mph on motorways, it's caught the unwary before...

Stone

This isn't going to make Neil any happier but Excalibur Army sell track links with moulded rubber pads for the BMP and T55!

linky - see page 43

Now the only question is whether BMP tracks will fit an MTLB. The road wheels look the same...

Stone

As an alternative to the silly prices here (!) it might be feasible to import a live SA-80 from the States and deac it here - they sold a fair few semi-auto variants out there to target shooters. Worth a try if you're going over on holiday, maybe?

Stone

Problem is the same I had when having pads fitted to the OT's tracks - the pads bolt on and to fit them to the "normal" steel tracks requires holes to be plasma cut fairly accurately for the securing bolts.

Id you were buying a Bulgarian piece of kit then not a problem but for converting a vehicles of similar type from any other country look to be paying around £9,000 for that work to be done as the track has to be removed, broken down to individual links, holes cut, pads obtained and bolted into place and then the whole lot reassembled and refitted!!

That was part of the masterplan - you'd hope a pair of tracks + shipping would come in less than that! It's obviously way easier to fit a new pair of tracks than to disassemble and modify them link by link. Plus you get left with a set of offroad tracks for when it's snowing :cool2:

Not sure if the pads are separate or bonded to the links but wasn't someone on here investigating having rubber-metal bonded items restored? Putting the 'tyres' back on roadwheels rings bells for some reason.

Stone

Just seen a Yellow DUKW on BBC news in London. It was in the background of an outdoor news report, and had been converted into a tour bus type thing. Anyone know anything about it?

The brakes aren't great, one nearly ran me over on the way to the Imax a couple of weeks ago :nut:

Stone

Isuzu make good reliable disiels.

Second that, we've got a generator with an Isuzu 4LE1 (2.2l, 54HP) in it, it's a bit of a beast

Stone

The wording for locomotive says "constructed", not "adapted"

Correct, equally it says equipment that's permanently or semi-permanently mounted is disregarded as goods or burden for the test of whether it's carrying a burden, so our MJ (with a bedfull of fixed equipment) is technically not a goods vehicle, even though the "goods vehicle-derived" vehicles with an MOT exemption are the ones they're seeking to ban!

I think my head's going to explode if they make it spin any more :nut:

Stone

Don't forget £500-800 for fitting a side and rear impact bar kit - you'll need one to pass the MOT. Ours comes no lower than the existing fixtures and fittings on the chassis so shouldn't impact cross-country ability.

Stone

432 cannot be a locomotive because it is designed to carry a load, and a locomotive ot tractor has to be "designed so as to not itself carry a load"

How about for missile launcher / artillery / radar vehicles etc? (designed to carry 'fixed equipment permanently or semi-permanently fixed to the vehicle', I'd say...). By that definition a Cymbeline 432 would be OK but a troop-carrier not.

If you read the original C&U regs (you have to order a printed copy as they're just before the cutoff for being published online) you're allowed a width of 2.75m for locomotives, still doesn't cover a 432 or OT-90 but edges it a bit closer...

I think you're right in that there's no obvious registration class for vehicles that almost meet the C&U regs - in the past this has been widely ignored (witness the number of road-registered 432s) but now they're tightening up it seems to have exposed a gap in the middle. Width is obviously a sticking point for lots of things as there seem to be few classes that cover between 2.75m and 4.2m (the absolute maximum width of vehicle+load). I think you can have up to 3.2m with STGO 'tracked vehicle' but then you're only allowed to go to a port, railway station or 'demonstration' (whatever that might be defined as!) and only with police approval. More clarity would be very welcome on this at least - there are plenty of people willing to hand over road tax every year but without a class to slot their vehicles into.

Stone

:wow:

Wouldn't fancy trying to get out of one of those in a hurry!

Sad really, there's so much missing from the Withams ones there's not a lot of truck left

Stone

Very special army jeep.................:wow::wow::wow:

 

I like the futility of leaving the rear view mirror in it :rofl:

Stone

Having a poke around on Wikipedia the other day I noticed that many of the Soviet tracked vehicles fielded by Bulgaria may use rubber track pads, unlike (apparently) every other user...

Examples:

BMP1:

2S1:

MTLB:

T-72:

Israeli T72 for comparison:

Does anybody know if they make these padded tracks themselves for internal use, or were they widely available but not used? It obviously makes way more sense for parading if you can spare the manpower to change the tracks over (they seem to use normal flat links when deployed) but it'd make them a lot more desirable over here if you could ease your passage through DVLA :cool2:

Stone

Ours is a CONTAINER SIGNALS TRANSPORTABLE TRUCK MTG 1 TON CB101 (FV592340) but I don't know if 1t is loaded or bare weight. We've been meaning to get it to a weighbridge to compare laden-with-box and unladen weights but struggling to get the tax sorted out so it won't happen for a while...

The set of legs I have for lifting a full-length box body are labelled with a SWL of 4t so you know they won't exceed that...I believe the full-length boxes are approx 2.5t empty.

Stone

Down plating would only work on a cargo or flat platform really, as a box would add too much weight I would imagine?

It would be just doable with a half-length box, but you wouldn't have much space/weight budget to play with for fittings etc. Not sure but aren't you forbidden to carry a load while it's registered as a caravan? Would render it a bit pointless if you could only use half the bed...

Stone

Agreed it can not lift vertically up as you are moving in an arc in any direction but it is very close.

Thanks for the correction - I was just going from the dire warnings in the manuals! (only skimmed over as ours doesn't have a crane).

In retrospect we should have gone for a flat platform with crane as the base vehicle for our mods - we used a Ptarmigan relay but we already had a fitted-out cabin so the most we got out of the extra bits was the four stub mountings for the front pallet :banghead: It would have made our lives a lot easier - and lowered the blood pressure of our forklift driver!

Stone

Good point actually - the MJ crane can't lift straight up so it might be a bit of a hassle getting the box in the right place with it! Not sure about the TM one though...

Stone

The British Army just doesn't use a three colour scheme.

...except for that Pinzgauer!

My point is, they might exist but they'll be vanishingly rare as they'll all be special-purpose. It's pretty futile trying to hide something as chunky as a Bedford anyway :-D

Stone

More to the point, which DVLA office do you use? If they're more easy-going than the rest they might see a flood of frustrated owners showing up :cool2:

Stone

Looks like it was built to roll over anti-tank mines while still firing normally - something like the one below would stop you firing forward.

Bit of a strange one though, you'd think it'd draw the fire of every schmuck with a Panzerfaust!

Stone

There's another pic of a Bedford with crane here (found while looking for something else!) This one also has the bed pushed back rather than shortened.

There are pics of LoggyDriver's (very nice) truck here. Rather than lift with a crane or forklift the most hassle-free way of loading and unloading them is to jack them up on legs that fit into the corners, then drive underneath it. The legs are rather like rockinghorse droppings though, our set's going to stay put

One of the half-length cabins as used on Ptarmigan nodes would fit nicely on a shortened-bed Bedford with crane - leaving you a couple of feet of leftover bed area for storage etc. For work use you could just crane the box off (they're quite light, approx 1.5t) but do heed the warning stamped on the sides about using spreader bars when lifting!

Stone

I've never seen a 3-colour one, doesn't mean they don't exist but I would have thought they'd be more obvious if they'd done it widely. The most obvious (to me) place they may have done it would have been in Bosnia, where a few British vehicles picked up foreign camo styles (like this Pinzgauer - British but in a 3-colour camo), but this link shows MJs there in the standard temperate 2-colour disruptive style.

Why not just stick with the well-documented ones? At least then you won't get loads of people telling you it looks wrong

Stone

I wonder if it's a standard chassis with an add on end piece, or whether it was a special, made to order for this vehicle?

Good question. Looking more closely the one depicted has one more double-hook for the dropsides than ours (8 vs our 7). I haven't got an exactly-equivalent pic of ours to hand but the proportions don't look quite right either...

Stone

There are two threads you could start with:

link 1

link 2

Stone