David Herbert

Re the brass stud, it looks like there was more to it but it has broken off. Could it have been an earth bonding point with a copper earth braid going to the door itself or even the A post ? David

I am not seeing your photos but at the start of WW2 Fordson tractors were painted orange all over for the civilian market. It quickly became clear that a field full of that days production on the edge of London made a rather good marker for the german bombers so they changed the colour to gloss dark green all over. I am not sure if Ford picked out the Fordson script on the radiator in yellow/orange but it is very common on restored ones. David

For comparison, a L322 Range Rover (the previous shape to the current ones) weighs 2.6 tons, has a fuel tank that weighs just over 110 kg when full of diesel and has a range of over 500 miles in the real world. Battery tech will have to improve quite a bit to compete but it is not impossible. The Apple car will of course have its own charger connector that is very special and only available from 6 major city centre dealers. David

In general I agree with Paul but it should be said that the only reasion that electric vehicles are relatively cheap to run is that there is vastly more tax on petrol and diesel than on electricity. Obviously the huge subsidy on the purchace price of EVs and their even bigger extra initial cost will gradually come down as production volumes go up but that will be spoilt by the government inventing a way to tax their use. This is something they will have to do to replace the vast income that they presently get from fuel related taxes. As you can't identify taxed and untaxed electricity once you have charged your car with it we will then have to have a system of charging for the actual use of roads, probably by a GPS black box, which will also know when you exceed the speed limit and can automaticaly fine you......... . Similarly, solar panels are only relevent if they are heavily subsidised as they are now (and you use them to feed electricity into the grid in exchange for other electricity that you charge your electric car with overnight). Yes they will also get cheaper to produce but the subsidies will reduce too. I think that although it is certain that we have to vastly reduce our use of fossil fuels there is a huge cost increase in any of the alternatives and we are just going to have to get our heads round that. One positive suggestion I have is that when battery tech gets to the point of allowing a genuine range of at least 500 miles in a vehicle that still has some luggage space and is affordable, that it should be possible for manufacturers to agree to standard formats for replacable battery packs. We could then buy a car with say a 5 or 10 year lease agreement on battery use. when the battery needs charging you either do it yourself at home or go to a "filling station" as we do now and physicaly swap the battery for a fully charged one. That way the batteries that are life expired can be the responsibility of the battery company and will not result in the scrapping of the rest of the car on purely economic grounds, the battery change over should be quicker than it is at present to fill a car with liquid fuel, and we will not all need to have charging facilities at home. It would also mean that automotive batteries could be taxed...... And stolen ! David

Brilliant idea using flexible chimney liner. You don't have to do the bend in one go - if it goes stiff, thread the liner back over it and re-heat as many times as you need. Having a proper boiler must help too ! David

I think Tomo.T is probably correct about the instruction plate on the end of the fuel tank but it is possible that it is a cast plate and the "white" lettering is just the light reflecting off the raised letters in the same way that the coach bolts in the cargo body are "picked out in white". Just a thought... David

I agree with Mike. On the basis that things usually start off simple and get more complicated I would say that the two tyres together are the later design. Note that there are no blocks that are pure rectangles unlike the top tyre. That is a difference that you could ask a seller about that is pretty clear. Most modern tyres have a code written on the sidewall that defines exactly what design they are, often with 5 or 6 letters/numbers. That is much more usefull than the "XL" style name but gets overlooked because it has no obvious meaning and can be confused for date codes etc. Try comparing the tyres you have and see if any codes show up on all of them. This might be a way forward, it has helped me in the past. Good luck, David

I believe that the rear springs are the uprated ones fitted post war when the MWs were uprated to 1 ton. The war time ones have fewer but thicker leaves. David

Another confusion is that some FV series vehicles have been used for a very long time (I think FV432s are about the oldest still in service) and as a result manufacturers have gone out of business and even some manufacturing methods have become impossible. As a result new parts get designed that are completely interchangeable with the originals but with new numbers. Certainly the intention was that the FV range would use as many standard parts as possible and that where possible a new design would use as many existing parts as practical but that didn't stop Saracen, Saladin and Stalwart having completely different brakes despite being heavily related designs. If you look through a parts list you will find that most parts that were special to the original build of that vehicle do have FV numbers with a particular first few digits, showing that the design was allocated a block of part numbers early on. That can be handy as you can spot the original application if you have an eye for that sort of thing. As far as I know no one has tried to list any of this as it is such a vast task. David

I had a MWR many years ago. I don't now have its chassis number but it had most of the late features except that it did not have the sling plates on the hubs. It had the pressed filler caps and at the time I remember that most of the Bedfords that I came accross had pressed caps. The cast ones I think were a very late feature though were completely interchangable so could turn up on any Bedford of that period that had that style of tank. David

A good point ! Thank you. But I still think that the original is cast. David

Those spring eyes were the posh design, with the rolled eyes that we are used to being the cheap and nasty way to make them but as metalurgy improved and cost became more important the rolled ones became more reliable and took over. I thought that they had disapeared from automotive use by then though. The did continue in railway use for some time though. David

Actually not that easy to get the shapes of the raised bosses for the three bolts where they blend into the trumpet shaped curved 'spokes'. This will require some care to carve out of a wood / MDF pattern but to get them right in mild steel would be a challenge, particularly as the turning operation would leave a considerable amount of material to be removed by hand / angle grinder. If you earn your living programing a CNC universal mill it would be possible to get the shape with a ball ended cutter but that would involve some complex programing and the right contacts. Alternatively it would be possible to machine the bosses as simple cylinders (I guess they are roughly 1" diameter and length) and weld them into machined holes in the spokes with a big weld fillet on both sides. Cleaned up by hand the welds could look ok but there would be quite a lot of seperate machining operations, weather manual or CNC with a vast amount of metal turned to swarf unless the tube that brazes to the prop shaft tube, the spokes, and the rim are each seperate pieces all welded together. As the idea is to reproduce what was originaly a casting and Steve is getting really good at pattern making, I think that a casting would be the way to go. David PS, just realised that I did not address the question of; is the original a casting or a forging? I very much doubt that it is a forging as the combination of the bolt hole bosses, the generally thin tubular sections and the holes between the spokes would together have made forging difficult. Forging is much more suited to 'lump' shapes like gear blanks and things that will form without the material needing to flow too far from the original red hot billet, as in con rods and crankshafts. Although this is a critical component in that it must not fail, it is not that highly stressed, being driven by a rubber disk via three smallish bolts, so a casting would be fine. When this truck was built it was much harder to machine things to shape than to cast or forge things, so every effort was made to avoid machining to shape if possible. The machining was seen as very much a finnishing operation to give exact dimensions and surface finnish. Thus it would have been far more trouble than it was worth to either mill out or punch out the holes between the spokes in this component compared to casting them in which is easy. So the fact that they chose to include holes points to castings.

I would be quite happy with it as a SG iron casting. If you feel that it is marginal then it could very easily be made a little heavier than original without it looking wrong. I would think that the rim is most likely to fail and is key to preventing the spokes being twisted by the cantilevered load of the bolts attaching the rubber coupling. I think that the loads are not really 'shock' loads as the rubber coupling must give some cushioning effect and of course the original bolts were not of very high tensile material or very large diameter and I would have seen them as the weakest link. Just my gut feel David

I was talking to Dan on the phone yesterday and mentioned the above. Unfortunately Dan cannot get onto the internet much these days so I have now been delegated as Dan's honorary PR officer ! Last year Dan had to move his business at very short notice. There was very little choice of affordable industrial units but eventually a deal was done on one only just large enough for the actual money earning work, not the Halley too. All effort then had to go into the actual relocation of the machinery and stock and then trying to catch up with the backlog of work. As a result the Halley has been safely hidden away but not forgotten. Dan has been making small parts and further researching how to rebuild the partial engine (believed to be a Continental) that is shown earlier in this thread. This will involve making conrods and other key parts from scratch so not a minor task. Obviously Dan would still very much like to find a correct Halley engine, in any condition, and also an original gearbox/transmission would be a huge help. There must be a dead Halley with trees growing through it somewhere ! I will happily forward any leads to Dan who I know has been very gratefull for the interest shown in this project from all over the world. Dan will be back..... David

Sounds like there was a shortage of this exact part but someone worked out that a similar one with a different flange could be converted. But did it badly ! David

The only thing that comes to mind to explain how a conrod in a stationary engine could get bent is that water filled the combustion chamber and then froze many times, gradually pushing the piston down the bore. If this started with the piston at TDC the conrod might have been the weakest link. I have never seen it before though, usually the cylinder is burst instead. David

Me too ! I have been playing with historic military vehicles for 47 years now and have never knowingly even seen an IGL3 so would be fascinated to see it in detail. To see the level of interest in the minute details of restorations look at the number of views of the first few threads in this section of the forum. Most people will never get the opportunity to work on pre war vehicles so it is great that some owners are prepaired to put in the extra effort and let us join in, if only with moral support and bright ideas. Thanks for going public. David

Don't even think about a B80. The first 25 Martians had them and were hopelessly underpowered. All production Martians were built with B81s and the pre-production ones re-engined but even with the resulting 220hp (gross) at 3750RPM, they are working very hard most of the time. As most modern diesels of 200 + HP don't rev that quickly diesel conversions can finnish up making an already slow vehicle into a real pain. I must admit though that a late-ish Detroit 6-71 would sound amazing and can be built up with the supercharger on either side and turning either way, so it should be possible to make it fit. They also run quite fast. With an open exaust you can be heard a couple of miles away too ! I think that advert in the post above is from the USA given the location, despite the £100,000 figure (for what?). David

Or Jenolite (I think that is how you spell it) Most of these kind of products are based on phosphoric acid with wetting agents added as are self etching primers for steel. David

Quite likely to be BA, I would have thought. David

Oops, sorry, I think my brain is disolving ! :red: David

Really great to see a colour photo of a FV421 in use (if broken). Seems to be as originaly built with no mods at all. It is not one of the very first ones as it has the front windows with rounded corners vs the bolted in ones with square corners on the first few vehicles. Please Ron, lend Lynn the original transparency so we can get a better look (and any other FV421 ones) and thank you for letting us see them. David

I can imagine that although unconventional, the mono trailer would probably tow well enough as shown above but I am suprised that it was possible to actually load the tank onto the trailer with the mono trailer attached. Those trailers are very high and even with the length of a Centurion the tank really stands on its tail as you climb up the ramps. I loaded a late model Sherman onto one once and could barely see the guy directing me because the tank tipped back so far (though the Sherman is much shorter). On the other hand to take the mono trailers off and re-fit them was a real pain and without the tank they were immoveable without a crane. They were a dreadfull solution to increasing the range and had no redeeming features at all ! David

At first sight that is a simple machining job but drilling the holes through the two ends of the casting so they are in line and central to the barrel shaped pieces is actually not simple at all. Presumably it was done from one end with a very long drill but the scope for it wandering is huge. I am really not sure how I would have tackled it. How did you do it? David