AlienFTM

If you visit the Tank Museum at Bovington, you'll see that their Panther bears a plaque describing how it was built from parts from the factory by the REME after the war to be used to conduct comparison trials with Centurion. Although the Centurion won, it says a lot for the Panther that it was still cinsidered goof enough to consider. Especially since I remember one source suggesting that six months' tank development in wartime is the equivalent of twenty YEARS in peacetiime. If you look at the http://www.arrse.co.uk forums, somebody there states that Israelis fought against Jordanian Panthers during one of the Middle East wars.

XPM actually means Expanded Metal. It is semi sheared and stretched to produce its form. Used on machine guards, etc. Richard :shock: We all learn something new!

21 gallons. That's what I thought. A story you might enjoy. We had exercised for two weeks, first week east of Paderborn, second week west thereof. We finished up a lo-o-ong way from home. And I hadn't slept since 0400 Wednesday. Exercise ended mid-Friday afternoon and the tracks and Saracens all headed for the railhead (outside of exercise, movement by train drastically reduced track miles). Loading the tracks took well into the early hours of Saturday. Once they were loaded and on their way home, the Ferrets and Ladnrovers all set out. We must have had 5 Ferrets (RSM's (he got a lift back), two rebros and two Squadron Sergeant Major's (they also got lifts and supplied ersatz commanders for the journey home)). As Command Troop Sergeant's driver, we were the senior vehicle so we led. The journey was very close to maximum range. We drove over a crest and there was Paderborn a handful of miles ahead. Home territory. At the bottom of the hill was a set of traffic lights. The dual carriageway was straight and we roared off. Then, halfway down the hill, for the only time in my career, we ran out of fuel. The Ferrets all backed up behind us as we coasted toward the lights and I tried to direct my commander to the reserve switch, hidden under a mountain of webbing, sleeping bags, etc. Just as we started to run out of hill, he found the switch, turned it, and the engine caught. We roared off again ... just as the lights changed against us and the rest of the cars were left. We were first people back in camp by some distance, dekitted the wagon and I set off to see girlfriend after a long bath. She took one look at the bags under my eyes and sent me home to get some sleep. It was by now midday Saturday, head not having been in contact with pillow since 0400 Wednesday. I slept long into Sunday. ;o)

Hi Richard, You are going to be disappointed by XPM. It means cross-pattern material, the sort of stuff you make stowage bins from. ;o) In hangars and stores you might also see doors and partitions made from it. I HAD vast quantities of pics of Mark 2/3s, particularly from my time with the United Nations Force in Cyprus. They were taken for the benefit of my widowed mother, to let her know that I was having a ball in Cyprus (I'd been slack in writing on a recent Northern Ireland tour, so I made up on this tour). Unfortunately the pics all went to my mother (obviously) and after she died, my brother cleaned the house out and I never saw them again. Possibly good news is that I have a mountain of negatives filed away that have never been looked at since the day the pics were taken. Having bought a scanner with transparent materials adapter, I recently sat down and looked at a few. Most were of my children, but I did find a reel of Scorpions taken at Lulworth Ranges in 1977. If I ever get my life sorted and find the Ferret pics, I'd be happy to make them available. As to the question "Is it a rebro Ferret?" I have to say that there is nothing special about them. All they did was carry two radio sets to a suitable location and automagically connect them so that as one received on one net, the other one transmitted the signal on the other net for technical or tactical reasons. All Ferrets were built to carry two radios, so any would do. All rebro Ferrets that I ever encountered were straight Mk1s, but there is no reason why Mk1 variants with extended hull coamings might not be used as rebros. I doubt yours would have been a rebro in the late 70s - early 80s, since in my experience they all had .30" Browning MGs. That doesn't mean that it had not been used for rebro in an earlier time. As to the tubes on the front plate. Yes, certainly the bottom one was the standard storage position for four-foot Larkspur antenna rods. The military VHF band dictated antenna lengths up to eight feet; military HF worked best with 12 feet of antenna, though eight would usually suffice as the antenna was electrically tuned to the frequency in use. Clansman brought slightly different frequency ranges, so antenna sections were 1 metre long instead of four feet. Hard for me to guesstimate: is your upper tube just over 1m long? If not, (and assuming the upper tube is military) maybe your vehicle served some other specialised radio purpose. like maybe Forward Air Controller, talking to incoming Fighter Ground Attack aircraft on UHF frequencies and requiring even shorter antennae. Not convinced by this. I was Regimental Signals Storeman for about two years during which time we converted from Larkspur to Clansman. We held UHF sets but IIRC the UHF antenna was incredibly short (inches not feet). Do you know if your vehicle ever served a foreign army? Maybe the upper tube is the same idea, but for an entirely different frequency range. Assuming two sections per antenna, maybe the sets operated about 100-150MHz. But there are a lot of assumptions in that. Looking at your pic, the front antenna base looks like it's probably Clansman. It might be Larkspur HF (C13) but I'd have expected the HF antenna to be at the rear so that the antenna could be sloped without risking the commander's head. I'll go for Clansman. We didn't change our antenna storage tubes after conversion, so I am truly confused by your upper tube. Hope some of this helps.

In an Armoured Recce Regiment in 1976, I did a Scorpion Driving and Maintenance (D&M) course at Tidworth. We had a Qualified Testing Officer (QTO) in our squadron, the Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant in fact. Already holding a car licence, I was put to the front of the queue for my Group H (track-laying vehicle steered by its tracks) test. My instructor told me to take him over the driver training area at the back of camp and for ten minutes I took him over knife-edges, up and down impossible slopes and so on until, on the IC, he asked, "How long before you reach the road so we can start the test then?" I got him to the road, drove down the A338 to its junction with the A303 then turned off. He told me he'd seen enough, get out and swap places with the second candidate (who'd been sat in the gunner's seat the whole time). After the cock-up in that he didn't want to see the driver training area and the short test, I was convinced I'd failed, but upon return to barracks he presented us both with pass certificates. Note that I also had to pass a maintenance test: Carry out vehicle first parade Change oil filter etc etc Not a clue how it would work at a civvy test centre - haven't seen one of them in 30 years. Maybe if you know someone who knows an Army QTO you might be able to sort something?

I have just replied to another Ferret thread and spent a lot of effort trying to describe a custom user modification we used in BAOR: an XPM stowage bin on top of the engine decks. Then I find you post a picture. Grr! ;o) Intrigued by the ladder. We always jumped in my day (we didn't really: a foot on the wheel hub, foot on the tyre and up). until one day we found a four foot steel ladder and it was permanently carried in the stowage bin. But then, my driver and I lived a life of luxury while we were rebroadcasting the command net. We had a four man Chieftain bivvy, a low coffe table, folding chairs, camp beds. It was a hard job but somebody had to do it. ;o)

It is indeed an APCRA (Armoured Command Post Royal Artillery). When our regiment deployed to BAOR in late 1977, we (Command Troop) were mistakenly issued with these "double decker" ACPRAs instead of ACVs (Armoured Command Vehicles. We drove from Paderborn to Moenchengladbach to collect them (and four Ferret Scout Cars) and it took forever to make the return journey. You may have noticed that this is a good few inches (14 sticks in my mind) taller than normal Saracens and like another poster has stated, it guzzles petrol. I don't remember ever getting one above 20 miles per hour. As a vehicle it was dire and the mistake was rectified within a month or so when we were issued with ACVs instead. But as a collector's piece it will be very rare. I don't think, apart from the chape of the cabin, there was anything unusual about these vehicles and there oughtn't IMHO be a problem over diversity of spares.

Hello, my name is Neil (see? I bothered to read the Please Read This before joining) and this is my first post here. I served seven years in a recce regiment in the 70s and 80s. My first real drive of a military vehicle was a Mk2 Ferret in Northern Ireland, I did a six month UN tour on Mk2 Ferrets with the UN in Cyprus. In BAOR I drove rebroadcast Mk1 Ferrets for a year and commanded them for another year. But those two winters on Ferrets in BAOR were cold. As the OP surely knows, there was no heating for the crew - I found that my left foot, resting on the lower front plate beside the GCP, would be in real danger of freezing. And yet I never ever saw this carburation phenomenon. I don't doubt the words of all the other posters on this thread: I must have been lucky. What can I add to the thread? We customised all our Ferrets in BAOR by welding mounting points on the four corners of the engine deck then attaching storage bins made of XPM to these mounting points with butterfly nuts. This made refuelling difficult, since we had to tip the (usually full!) storage bin over to one side before lifting the engine deck to get at the fuel filler cap. Did this somehow insulate the engine deck as a whole from losing heat by convection? I don't really think so: even at the central ridge, the closest point of the bin to the engine decks, there was probably a couple of inches' clearance. We certainly never obstructed the louvres as suggested by one poster. All I can suggest is that our Ferrets were brimming, behind the commander's seat, with radio equipment and even with a storage bin, we still crammed personal kit like webbing, sleeping bags, personal weapons down the sides of the radios. Could this have somehow affected the airflow? After all this time I struggle to picture a Ferret without radios fitted and what sort of bulkhead existed between crew and engine. But one thing I really do have to say is that I envy anyone who has a Ferret to drive. For decades I have told anyone who'd listen that the Ferret is the best ride you'll ever have. I do have a question for you if that is okay. The Scorpions that comprised the bulk of our regiment had a 93 gallon petrol tank. How big is the petrol tank on a Ferret? I distinctly remember exercising on Salisbury Plain 1976-77 and our Squadron Leader simply could not remember that our Mk5 Swingfire Ferrets had nothing like the endurance of the Scorpion and the GW Troop Leader was forever screaming for more petrol. Have a good ride.