AlienFTM

There is some minor discussion about design on the Ferret Gallery thread. Since you need to be able to move the basket in order to get to the fuel filler, we needed to design around this in service. In barracks we could remove the baskets, but of course BAOR spent 45 years on four hours' notice to move. The design we standardised in in my own (and Bazz's) regiment was to use something like 1" or maybe 2" angle iron to make the edges, with the corners extended to create legs. Standard XPM made the sides. The edges of the XPM were inside the angle iron, hiding the sharp edges. Mount points were welded on to the engine decks and holes drilled so that the basket could be attached using large-thread butterfly nuts and bolts. As discussed on the thread, I recommend that the attachment be designed so that the basket lifts sideways (either way, depending which pair of butterfly nuts you remove). This allowed us to lift the basket and the access hatch easily on either side, whether to refuel or to service. (After all these years I cannot remember what we could access on the other side.) Cover the contents with a tarpaulin and use bungees to tie it all down, and there is no need to empty the basket before lifting, but it can get quite heavy when full and make it a two-man lift.

As a CVR(T) crewman I was told not to expect the armour to survive a hit by anything bigger than .50".

Looks to me like it ought to attache to a corner of a Cent mantlet. With an internal mantlet and a thermal sleeve on the barrel, I cannot for the life of me see why a Chieftain would have a mantlet shroud fitted. Usual caveat.

NEARLY complete? Within the Kit, First Aid, AFV and MT large, only two items were chargeable, the scissors and the eyebath. Everything else was consumable and in theory could be replaced without having to bill owner for its loss. Over time, dressings etc got used, but come the kit check by the Troop Sergeant, when he came to call out the Kit, First Aid, AFV and MT large, he would instantly append "Scissors and eyebath." Driver would then wave the box in the air to show he had it, then the scissors and eyebath. If the scissors went deficient ("diffy"), any old pair would be waved in its place. Kit check over, Troop Sergeant might expect to be given a list of deficiencies from the First Aid Kit and indent for them. But he had more pressing considerations, like tracking down those diffy items that he'd have to bill the driver (and the gunner from his kit in turn) for or make an exchange of buckshees (acquired kit) with Third Troop next door who happened to have all our missing items which mysteriously always seemed to exactly balance out our buckshees and their diffies. Having hunted around the rest of the squadron, he's try his pals elsewhere, see it the RQMS(Tech) owed him a favour, bribe him with a beer - or a crate depending on the cost of the diffy - ot ultimately bill the driver for losing his kit. So, as to "I think its nearly complete," my answer is, "For the authentic appearance, throw out all the contents except the scissors and eyebath and when anyone asks to look inside, proudly rattle your Kit, First Aid, AFV and MT large. Oh and yes it's the universal armoured vehicle First Aid kit (which was issued to CVR(T), Ferret and Saracen ACV crews in my experience), also issued to large MT.

Is there not a dedicated mount point for the D10 reel on the turret of the Mark 2? Or has my memory let me down YET again? I certainly never mounted my D10 reel on the back plate. It probably lived in the big side bin at the bottom, cos I never needed to use it. As a rebro Ferret all I needed was the magic switch settings on the radios, broadcast (on both nets since I was the rebro station) "Hello all stations this is 98 Alpha. This is an automatic rebroadcast net. Out" then get me book out. But that only ever happened once. I was on call to rebroadcast, but spent my years as fetch & carry for the CO and an extra name on the ACV radio stag roster.

Excuse me for a slight hijack of the thread. Somewhere in this forum I am sure I read that somebody owns a Mark 1, 02CC74 which I remember because I drove 02CC76 in 1978 (at least that's how I remember - it might have been 02CC74: my record of being wrong recently does not bear scrutiny: seeing the picture makes me wonder if in fact I am in the picture, unseen in the bowels of the FSC). If you read this, please PM me. I have found a picture on a friend's private Facebook group of your vehicle in service with Intercomm Troop of my old regiment, 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars. It isn't dated, (I would be surprised if Intercomm Troop were not the role, if not the title as I knew it, of my own role in 1978.) I have not asked his permission to copy his picture, but if you get in touch with me, I'll put you in contact with him. Sorry. Please do not reply to this post as it is off the OP's topic (even if it is entirely on-topic as far as the thread title goes).

I have no way of knowing. It is over 30 years since I was in Cyprus but only a handful since I discovered that UNFICYP vehicles had later adopted a UN numbering system.

I drove a vehicle from this tranche, 01EC28 with UNFICYP Force Reserve Squadron out of Nicosia in 1976-77. IIRC it's a late Mark 2/3. It might have been a Mark 2/4. The 2/3 was the definitive turreted Ferret and earlier Mark 2s were upgraded (primarily by uparmouring IIRC) to Mark 2/4. Oh it's a Mark 2/3: it says on the document. It says it was with the Queen's Own Yeomanry, a TA (Territorial Army - if you are American, think National Guard. In those days it was styled TAVR: Territorial Army and volunteer Reserve, which is why QOY is postscripted (V) to indicate Volunteer Reserve) regiment between 1971 and 1983 before undergoing conversion. I have absolutely no way of knowing what the conversion was (though I am sure there are people here with access to the books). 1983 may well have been a good time to convert from a Larkspur to a Clansman radio system. My regiment (front line BAOR) converted our vehicles from Larkspur to clansman in 1980. I remember 28 went like brown stuff off an entrenching tool. In the Cyprus winter I spent two times two-week tours of Skouriotissa in the Troudos Mountains. 28 developed a starting problem which led to me bump-starting it down a rough track from a Danish OP on the Green Line through a minefield. We got it started and limped home to Skouriotissa where our pet REME Armoured Vehicle Mechanic (VMA or A-Mech) diagnosed a dead starter motor. New starter motor sent out from the Light Aid Detachment (LAD) at the Squadron's base at Nicosia Airport. REEM and I spent six hours undoing the three mounting bolts holding the starter motor on the Ferret floor (the belly access plates were tiny and the REEM ended up sawing his 5/8" (9/16"?) AF OJDE spanner in half so that he could reach the bolts. Starter motor arrived in the middle of the night and we spent another nine hours feeding the new starter motor around the engine into position and securing it. As you've worked out by now, replacing a Ferret starter motor is usually done after a pack lift. Everything back together ... no change. We were instructed to bring 28 back to the LAD where it could be worked on conveniently. Just after dark I set off (with my commander, the Troop Leader in his best kit because there happened to be a do on in the Officers' Mess) over the mud tracks through the mountains back to Nicosia. I did the journey in 45 minutes. People were impressed: the best time anyone had ever done for the journey was 34 minutes in a lightweight Land Rover dry in bright daylight. Turned out to be a duff battery. I'd previously had tracking problems: VERY close to the Turkish OP line just outside of Famagusta, I found the front wheels splayed like a fat uncle in an armchair. A good few hours having broken out the emergency Compo rations while we awaited recovery. Very shortly after replacing the battery, 28 went off for overhaul and I was given a replacement which, though older, was like new, and drove like it. Your vehicle seems to have spent a lot of entire life either in a Central Vehicle Depot (Command Vehicle Depot? It's been a long time.) in Ludgershall (I know it well: was stationed next door in Tidworth) or a TA regiment. The first entry looks like Royal Horse Guards, These are Household Cavalry, now merged to become RHG/D (Royal Horse Guards and Dragoons: the only regiment known officially to all by its nickname, The Blues and Royals). There is a line in there says it spent ten years with 11 Field Squadron (I presume Royal Engineers), So to sum up, my guess is you have a late model Ferret with low mileage. Probably a prime example. The downside is your actual vehicle probably has probably never been anywhere or done anything exciting. You may be lucky and find 11 Fd Sqn RE got up to something between 1984 and 1994. The other upside is that IMCO opinion, this will be the very best ride of your life.

Last week on Meridian they visited the Black Arrow (?) launch site on the Isle of White. I really thought that using the Isle of Wight as a rocket test range was a wah, but apparently not. The programme mentioned the launch of the UK's sole entirely-UK satellite, launched about 1971, before we gave up trying to compete and started buying off-the-shelf USA kit.

Hear hear. When I was a lad I used to build Airfix kits, aircraft then later tanks. I could never get my head around Airfix providing alternative parts. If they gave me, say a bomb and eight rockets and the instructions said to fit one for a Mark A or the other for a Mark B, I'd just slap the lot on. I am no longer ten years old of course and I know better.

UIN is another abbreviation that's good for an argument. RAPC invented the UIN decades ago to index Unit Imprest Account numbers. It was the Imprest Account that handled things like cash payments to soldiers, petrol coupons (in BAOR) and MOD money transacted by the unit, unlike for example the Commanding Officer's Public Fund which gave him discretion to buy "stuff" and the various Mess funds. When the rest of the Army went digital and discovered they need such an index, they hijacked UIN and called it Unit Identity Number. Shockingly, Googling for "Unit Identity Number" returns a couple of hundred hits, whereas "Unit Imprest Number" returns not a single hit.

Command Troop 15/19H had Saracen ACVs replaced by brand spanking new Sultans in 1979. Because the Sultan came with its own very nice issue bivvy, they no longer needed the old, acquired Chieftain bivvies that the Saracen crews had used (well 15/19H had only recently converted to Recce and we had a lot of kit acquired over the years). As rebroadcast Ferret commander, I was delighted to have a cascaded-down 4-man Chieftain bivvy to serve a two-man crew. Stuff the problem of how to erect it. If we were not located in a barn, where we didn't need the bivvy, we would be in a wood. Erect the bivvy between a couple of trees, facing outward with a view wherever possible, prepare the maggots to sleep in, lay out coffee table and chairs, crack a couple of cans and sit and savour the view. What a civilised way to keep 3 Shock Army at bay. Memory tells me the other rebro crew used the smaller 3-man CVR(T) bivvy. Everything else was equal but Dave and I had more living space.

I thought we had a map tool where people put their locations in? Or am I wrong YET again? (Opens home page in another tab and fails miserably to find the map tool. Wrong again I guess.)

Close but no coconut. You have to understand that ASCII was a standard derived by (or registered with, whatever) the American National Standards Institute (ANSI: equivalent to BSI). So in fact there is a document somewhere in their archives which defines the American Standard for Character Information Interchange. But because everybody talks about ASCII Code, the assumption is that ASCII is as you say and the whole internet now refers to it as do you. It's another battle I have struggled to fight, but ... oh what's the point? If only Mr Gates had used the pre-existing EBCDIC as his character code-set, life would have been so much simpler, especially for us mainframosuarus dinosaurs. lol Edit. p.s. Smile back on face, back out from under stone and ready for the full half hour argument. http://www.jumpstation.ca/recroom/comedy/python/argument.html Angry man: WHADDAYOU WANT? Man: Well, Well, I was told outside that... Angry man: DON'T GIVE ME THAT, YOU SNOTTY-FACED HEAP OF PARROT DROPPINGS! Man: What? Angry man: SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS TOFFEE-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT! Man: Yes, but I came here for an argument!! Angry man: OH! Oh! I'm sorry! This is abuse! Man: Oh! Oh I see! Angry man: Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door. M: Oh...Sorry... Angry man: Not at all! (under his breath) stupid git.

I spent the weekend looking on the internet for back-up of my claims. (I do have books but they are in deep archive and I am not going to turn the house upside down.) I found only one site which backed up my claim in a roundabout way, an apparently ancient manual on Waffen-SS camouflage patterns. Clearly, history has been changed underneath me and I am now wrong. I apologise to anybody I have annoyed with this argument. Hereafter, I shall refer to DPM simply as DPM and if anybody ever asks what it stands for, I'll hold my tongue and shan't get dragged into the argument. This is what happens when a mistake is allowed to propagate and turn into a monster. In another generation, all history will be politically correct and our grandchildren will be taking exams in txtspk instead of English. I hope this draws a line and I can come out of my stone at some point.

Well, whilst I ought to respect the Army bibles, sorry but I simply cannot. They may call it disruptive in their manuals until they are blue in the face, but the pattern of camouflage is dispersed, not disruptive and they are wrong. I'll posit that they derived the abbreviation for the Dennison during the war, when it was indeed disruptive and when the rest of the army got combats, the manual writers either forgot or were ignorant (by which I do not mean stupid) and failed to update the book. Throughout my career, people who knew always taught me Dispersed, and explained the difference because in Recce camouflage makes a difference and people who called it Disruptive got slapped. I believe that like elsewhere, people these days just become sloppy and allow errors to become fact (like ASCII - see below). I shall accept that you have documentary proof that, according to a reliable book, I am wrong. It is just sad that errors like this in important documents do not get stamped on. The more I think about this, I now vaguely remember exchanging a combat jacket in Paderborn (which dates it as 1977 - 1982) and noticing that the label, instead of saying "SMOCK MAN'S COMBAT DPM", said "SMOCK MAN'S COMBAT DISPERSED". Thinking further, I remember a friend whose mother worked in a factory churning out combats and they always used the word "dispersed".This implies to me that people who did not have "disruptive" burnt onto the brain learned the correct term not the official term. A challenge. Tell me was ASCII stands for. I'll give you a clue. You'll find hundreds of thousands of wrong answers on the internet but my search returns less than two thousand right answers. (In the days when search engines were primitive, I only found EIGHT correct answers on the entire internet, one of which was the website of the body which owns it.)

I always liked the original tranche of Scorpions: Hot running water (from the BV) Cold running water (from the turret tank) Air conditioning (from the NBC pack piped direct into the respirator) Etc, etc. Maybe the subject of a new thread listing how a used car salesman might make selling points out of features on YOUR military vehicle? "All MOD cons".

Yer lucky he said PW. Skoda built arguably the best tanks in Europe pre-war. One of Hitler's biggest gains in taking the Sudetenland was the acquisition of enough model 35s and model 38s (becoming PzKpfw 35(T) and 38(T) respectively, where T = Tscheschisch = Czech) to re-equip and redesignate his four Light Divisions as Panzer Divisions. And so good were the 38(T)s that when the gun tanks became obsolete, they converted them to extremely successful Hetzer assault guns.

Oh dear. The bloke with the MP40 walking in front of the PkKpfw4 ... I can just about tolerate the fact that he is walking past a vehicle whose model (it looks like an H or a J to me: I don't have a ruler. Most likely an H) suggests very late war and whose SS Leibstandarte badge confirms it, he is wearing post-1943 boots and gaiters, his collar and lapel are Feldgrau, not the darker green of the early war,but he has a helmet carrying decals on the side, when every German combat soldier and particularly Waffen SS, by this time in the war had long since painted the helmet and while wet rolled it in sand to give it a severe matt finish (thereby painting out the helmet decals). I'll also tolerate that he is dressed as post-1943 Waffen SS: the trousers might well be 1943 pattern looking how poor the quality looks and he is wearing the typical, earlier jacket (which max and match is perfectly reasonable, like the other bloke), but not wearing one of dozens of patterns of camouflage smocks (at least, not to mention complete two-piece camouflage uniform to replace the Feldgrau). But somebody needs to tell him how, dressed as a combat soldier, he should carry an SMG. One hand holding the pistol grip and weapon hanging loosely at his side, leaving the other hand free to point with the open palm, nick an apple off a passing tree, smack his mukker about the head for fun or nick anything that's not tied down. Then he needs to learn how to swagger. Oh dear, oh dear. Sorry ... must ... get ... pedant ... hat ... off ... head.

Point taken. The world's gone mad. Every vehicle we had had smoke dischargers fitted. We never used them. We saw ammo for them. Once in a blue moon the REME might check if they worked. Often as not they didn't. Now where can I get a handful of WP smoke grenades to really spoil the day of these people looking at my Ferret?

Any vehicle with a Merritt-Brown (or derived: they go back about as far as the tank) comes with a neutral turn as an added extra. When I was taught, they still, decades later, hadn't worked out HOW the neutral turn worked: it just did. I don't know if anybody has yet worked it out. Plenty of reading if you google "Merritt-Brown gearbox" (add +"neutral turn" if you want more info on the neutral turn)

1. It's missing smoke dischargers. No problem. Easily sourced I'd imagine. 2. It's missing sand channels. Looking back I cannot remember whether or not we carried sand channels in BAOR. 3. Larkspur harness *. Very pleased to see, being a Larkspur-trained Control Signaller AFV, but ... a. There is no I/C amplifier in the harness: you need an A set (probably C42 or C13 but others are available) to get I/C. Either that or an emergency I/C system (as fitted to pre-Clansman CVR(T) for example) or something modern and commercially available. Pity, cos the Larkspur harness is there and looks right to me. b. Not a sniff of a radio set. Gives a false impression of room inside. 4. Looks to be in better nick than any of the number of Ferrets I had the pleasure to serve on over the years. 5. The comment made about the paint. I agree. I read somewhere recently that after however many years, the UNFICYP Ferrets had something close to half an inch of white gloss paint on where, every six months whether they needed it or not, they were painted by the outgoing driver to pretty it up for the incoming driver. Personally, I am not in the game, so my thoughts on price are irrelevant. If the cognoscenti say it's overpriced, I take their word for it. However, if I had the desire and the money to burn, I think I could do a lot worse than lash out of this. Assuming that on closer inspection it is as clean as it looks. You could do a lot worse. Oh and it has the Three-Oh which, like the man says, is right. (Yes I know other MGs were fitted, but not in my time.) Fit a GPMG and you seriously narrow the time you can depict (and you'd probably need to rip out the Larkspur harness which is a pity since it's there and apparently complete, whereas with the Browning you can have Larkspur or Clansman with no problems). As it stands it could be valid for a period probably in excess of 20, possibly 30 years. ---ooo0ooo--- * Purely as an aside, at the weekend I watched something on Discovery about two different groups (IWM Duxford and a group in Canada) restoring Centurions. One of the Canadians went to a group meet and found a Larkspur microphone (see image 26 of the Ferret for sale) still with greased paper around the threads. What a happy bunny.

Interesting. Just this morning came the following comment on the Army Rumour Service RAC Forum: http://www.arrse.co.uk/Forums/viewtopic/p=2770722.html#2770722 Look for: Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 7:56 am

I knew exactly what you meant. I was just wearing my pedant hat. HMS Troutbridge. OMFG yes! Where's me wiki?

If you are interested, there is one little anomaly hidden among that lot, the T64. T55 was replaced by T62, which was still just in service when I served in Recce. By the end of the 1970s, T62 had been replaced by not one but two tanks: T64 and T72. These two were remarkably similar apart from how they were fitted out. The T72 might have been described as an austere version (OTOH I think it was one of the Leopards included an Austere Version - AV - for export without some of the things the Bundeswehr held precious). The big physical difference between T64 and T72 was that the latter retained the medium tank suspension configuration that goes right back to the T34, while the T64 had a heavy tank suspension (small wheels and return rollers) akin to the KV series and the JS series. There was an operational difference too. T64 was intended for use by the Russians, while T72 was intended for export. Thus in Recce, an important task was to be able to tell whether the tanks to our front were the Russian 3 Shock Army or an East German outfit. Some things have always intrigued me about this. 1. The Russians went into Afghanistan in 1979 with T72s. Is this because they had no reserve T64s for their GSFG forces? 2. The T64 seems to have all but disappeared from the history books. You never hear people speak of them (they are a couple of generations obsolete now anyway). Did the Russians realise how expensive the T64 was and sacrifice it to the arms reduction treaties while retaining the cheaper T72s and standardising on one tank across WarPac? I suppose if I wasn't pretending to be working I could Google it. Actually wiki provides some interesting hindsight (what I have written is from memory after 30 years). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-64