AlienFTM

Interesting pic of the tac sign. The one marked 2 bears a C Squadron circle containing the number 4. Under the marking system in use during the Ferret years, this ought to be callsign 34, troop leader of 4 Tp C Sqn. The other Ferrets in the troop would be 34A (troop sergeant), 34B (troop corporal) and 34C (troop second corporal - like as not a lance corporal). My understanding is that under this system the Alpha, Bravo and Charlie suffixes would have been outside the squadron symbol on the right-hand side. As I have said elsewhere (today) in our regiment, we did not paint callsigns direct onto the vehicle, because if the troop leader's vehicle was shot from under him and as was the norm he commandeered the troop second corporal's vehicle (34C), the tac sign would now be wrong. Under our system, undo a couple of wingnuts, swap the signs painted onto metal sheets, exchange commanders' webbing and you were off. I hasten to point out that we did paint squadron tac signs direct onto the vehicle. Because we had the squadron sign on the turret front sides, the callsign at the back simply comprised, for example 24A in figures maybe 18" high.

Oh and I forgot mention wrt 24 volt bulbs. If you go into a motorway service station and find bulbs in green blister packs, it's likely they are 24v for the use of truck drivers. I learned this the hard way, being stopped by Dyfed Powys Police on my way home from holiday a few years ago for having a failed stop / tail light bulb. Being an upstanding citizen I called in at the first motorway services I came to (at the start of the M4) and bought a pair of bulbs. I hadn't finished fitting the bulb when a member of staff walked across and pointed out to ne that he'd just sold me 24v bulbs which were no good in a Mark 3 Golf (that I'd had for all of three weeks). Not having any 12v bulbs, he happily gave me a refund. It turned out that not a single motorway service station on the M4 had 12v stop / tail bulbs (which made for a rather long journey home, checking each service station in turn) and I had to sort it all out next day I had the last laugh. Up while the sparrows were still having their early-morning fag, I'd been to the local Halfords, replaced the bulb and had an MOT stamp on the "fix in seven days" notice thingy (don't ask me what it's called: I keep my car legal at all times) which I proceeded to present at my local Police station within 12 hours of being pulled over. What baffled the Southampton Police was that I presented them a Welsh document that they'd never seen before ... ... until they turned it over and read the English side. Well it made me laugh.

That happened to me on Ex Spearpoint in 1980. For the only time in my career I got orders to rebroadcast a net. We were umpires so I was able to get my driver to park in the middle of a field on a forward slope, able to devote my location to the radio and not having to compromise it with camouflage. We stopped in the middle of the field, threw up a pair of eight-metre masts, thought about the settings on the two newfangled UK/VRC353s to set them to rebroadcast one another, set the magic buttons and we each whipped out a good book to sit on top of the Ferret in the warm West German autumn sun and relaxed for a couple of hours. I kept a Staff User Headgear on and monitored the traffic to ensure the rebro was functioning. Over time I became aware of what sounded like increasing hear-end cross-talk. Unlike the Larkspur SR/C42 sets they replaced, the new 353 had an automatic squelch. Without going too deeply into wave theory, voice occupies only a small central portion of the waveband, the rest being noise. On Larkspur, having tuned in the set via a several-step process (dial-a-frequency on Clansman) and got out of the vehicle in the pouring rain and manually tuned in the antenna (turn a switch on Clansman), there was a third step, to tune out the squelch, turning a knob until the noise just cut out. As the battery power drained, the squelch needed adjusting down periodically and when the period got short, it was time to charge the batteries. We had no experience of Clansman and, not having had to get up and tweak the squelch, I discovered that the brake switch (might it have been a sender unit?) had failed and the brakes were permanently on. I whipped out the bulbs to save battery power and managed one last call to Command Troop reporting my LocStat and my situation. As it happened, the need for rebroadcast was at an end and Zero Alpha was coming on its way past me. We didn't even need the jump cable. We were on a straight track through the field facing gently downhill. I knew we could push start a Mark 1 Ferret downhill with four people because I had done it previously with a Mark 2 in UNFICYP, so we got a couple of bodies and got her going, then went directly to 15/15H LAD REME who replaced the part (ISTR it took a day or two to get the part and we spent the intervening time without brake lights while, when on the move, I encouraged the Salmon Trouts behind to always keep their distance).

During my eight years in BAOR, LR markings consisted solely of a Union Flag on two opposite corners and a squadron tac sign: Triangle = A Sqn (/Coy / Bty / etc) Square = B Sqn Circle = C Sqn Diamond = HQ Sqn In my regiment callsigns were only borne on A vehicles, on steel plates that could be unscrewed and swapped between vehicles to follow the commander (whose callsign it was) around if his vehicle became hors de combat. B vehicles did not carry callsigns.

"An undocumented feature is a bug." "A well-documented bug can be sold as a feature." The Computer industry.

... and indeed detailed plans exist, dated only a week or two after the raid for a German enhancement of the design, and the Germans continued to enhance the design throughout the war but never got the opportunity to use the weapon in anger. ALMOST as well. They learned during the raid, when they came under fire, that if the aircraft was not 100% level at release, the cylindrical Upkeep could fly off at all sorts of strange angles. Don't quote me but ISTR that one aircraft was lost BECAUSE as the Flak battery realised what was going on and started to engage, the Upkeep was released in this situation, bounced the wrong distance, failed to hit the dam, passed over it, exploded in the valley right under the Lancaster and destroyed it.

Reminds me of the old joke. Fire crew arrives at the scene of the crash landing to find the pilot climbing out. "What happened?" "Dunno I just got here."

Before we have a flame war over "It's a Chieftain" / "It's a Challenger" it's worth remembering that Bovvy alone has a number of hybrids on display that look like what they are not and none of which went into service (many of them not even having real armour or turrets, being mild steel or even aluminium mock-ups). It's also worth remembering that Challenger 1 derived from a very lucrative project to sell upgraded, tropicalised Chieftains to the Shah of Iran as Shir Iran ("Lion of Persia"), which was dropped when the Shah learned he could have tanks with Chobham armour. 1200 of these were built and called Shir Iran 2, but they never made it to Iran before the Shah was overthrown, there was no way on earth that the Ayatollas were getting them and so these 1200 unsold tanks were issued to the RAC as Challenger, so that in reality Challenger 1 is an evolution of Chieftain, further blurring the line between where Chieftain stopped and Challenger started. And of course Chieftain continued to evolve separately from the Shir Iran project. Edited to add: Never having being in service and / or not comprising armoured steel or Chobham does not make any of them any less interesting or special.

I'd forgotten about that one. Track stretches with use and once the correct tension cannot be achieved with the minimum specified number of links in the track, it's time for a pair of new tracks and a spot of track bashing. ISTR the correct minimum number of links on a Scorpion was 76 (appropriate) but I also assume the minimum number on a Spartan (/Sultan / Samaritan etc) must have been higher because of the longer hull. Don't quote me. Driver trained but I only played with the radios (and occasionally cleaned the gun). I'll see if I can manage to upload a picture of me that turned up on Facebook, taken 30 years ago when the photographer caught me unawares emerging from the bowels of the driver's compartment and definitely not expecting a camera in my face. It has caused much hilarity within the regiment: 1. cos the beret was all ower the knot-end and 2. because it is the only evidence that exists that I ever sat in a driver's seat.

As 72rover implies, if you want it to look kosher, it will look rather unlike many restored LRs because private owners spend a lot of time straightening bumps, sanding and airbrush painting whereas in service there will be lots of dents, not just bumps and scratches but areas of wing for example where the driver regularly climbs on top to undo and unfurl the cam net and the hessian over the windscreen, and applying paint with a mop. (I never saw paint applied with a mop, but I saw pleanty of paint schemes that looked like it.) In seven years close to vehicles I once saw a spray gun, when the existing paint was sanded off and everything was resprayed with IRR paint. The CVR(T)s looked good until the drivers mounted to put them back in the hangar and started to refit all the accoutrements. At Bovvy Open Day last year I admired the hard work everybody had put in to their pride and joy, but the vehicle that would have had my vote was a scruffy T59 (I was the only person in two days up to then not to have identified it as a T55) that really looked lived-in. Its (East European?) owner was equally pleased as punch when I told him this and we had a most interesting conversation.

So one buttered side will constantly be trying to get underneath the other to hit the ground. You've invented anti-gravity!

What he said. During winter, the theory was that you could whitewash out half the green, leaving white / green / black thirds. In seven BAOR winters I saw one bucket of whitewash and that was for Scorpions, not Land Rovers. Using the rationale for Micky Mouse Ear cam, I personally like to see the black used to break up the distinct shape and shadow of wheel arches etc. I'd suggest that two thick, uneven "stripes" of black over the green, to make up 1/3 of the area, is about right. I use the term stripe because I cannot OTOH think of a better description. There are plenty of pictures about to demonstrate what the "stripes" look like. I also seem to recall that there is no definitive rule (as opposed to a Rule) about painting the cam over the canvas. I think there was a Rule not to, but as a rule, many drivers did anyway. But not in my regiment.

Interesting. An an Armd Recce Regt in BAOR about 1980, we had all the CVR(T)s that were on our establishment, but I am quite sure our LAD did not have Samson. I don't think they had 432: Memory suggests some big wheeled beasty.

I am not going to argue with other people's recognition of it as a rifle stand, but I have to comment that it reminds me of a standalone AA mount for an LMG that we used on Salisbury Plain in 1977. Command Troop 15/19H went out to have a shoot at drones. As driver of OC B Sqn, he decided he wanted to watch and had me drive him out there, then he wangled us a cabby. As I recall, they had been there all day (it was mid-afternoon) and they only managed to hit a drone while I was watching. The drone operator was not impressed: it had run out of fuel and was gliding in.

Is there not a hand throttle on CVR(T) that you use to set it while static? ISTR being told always to leave it running at 1000 rpm while stationary to keep everything clean. But it was so-o-o-o many years ago and right now I can only picture the hand throttle on a Ferret. But I am quite certain Sultan had one because we regularly charged up all the batteries during the night by running the engine rather than rely on the 500W generator. Looking back I cannot now think why we didn't just run the 500W genny, but I have vivid memories of climbing from the bench seat over the commander's seat and into the driver's seat rather than trying to fight the way around the outside, over the bivvy and the hessian and under the cam nets.

Saracen ACV with turret? Never seen one of them before.

Notice a couple of minutes in German vehicles (in Panzergrau) marked with white crosses, which turned out to make excellent aiming marks until they painted them out with black, leaving just the edges in white in the style which became known as the Balkenkreuz. Then five years later the Americans landed in Normandy with great big white stars on the glacis plate and quickly learned the same lesson.

NATO reporting name Hind.

When I was in Basic Training in the 1970s they used to put bromide in the cookhouse tea to stop us thinking about women. I think it's beginning to take effect.

The last Larkspur-based Royal Armoured Corps Control Signaller AFV Class 1 course at Bovington took place in the summer of 1978 (I was on it). Memory suggests that in 3 Armd Div we replaced Larkspur with Clansman late in 1979 ready for the 1980 exercise season culminating in Ex Spearpoint / Crusader 80. My understanding has always been that Clansman was rolled out division by division and that 1 Armd Div got theirs a short time before we did. A41 was replaced by UK/PRC351/2 (the 351 and the 352 were the same beast, the 351 being converted to a 352 by the insertion of an RF amplifier between the set and the battery).

Which explains the appointment indicator userID. I saw the thread title and saw exactly where that was going.

I suspect if I dig around I'll find a picture of 02CC76 in my collection, IIRC with the commander and driver of Saracem ACV Zero Alpha larking around. From the days when I drove it (the FSC not the ACV).

Once the pin is pulled, Mr Grenade is nobody's friend.

I did my Larkspur RAC Control Signaller AFV Class 1 course at Bovvy in the summer of 78. One evening a bunch of us stuck our heads in and displayed in a cabinet was a C42. So they were museum pieces whilst still in front-line service in BAOR. Admittedly it was the very last Larkspur Con Sig course and two years later 3 Armd Div got the new. all-singing, all-dancing Clansman.

You learn something new every day! (ps. Zimmerit)