Adrian Barrell

This is the hull after blasting. It seemed a pity to remove all of the original paint and markings but I did record everything I found with photos and tracings. It turned into a long day as the blasters finished about 4.00 pm and I wanted to get it back inside and primed that day. So it was on with four bogies, jack it up and remove the stands, push it inside, jack it up, put it back on stands and remove the bogies. It needed a serious hoovering out and blow down before I could get the primer on, four gallons for the hull... I fairly quickly followed this up with the green and white. Another huge gap in my photo record is all the work on the suspension. All the bogies were stripped, some pins needing 400 tons to move! I put all new springs in and sorted out matching arms and castings. I had the four that were left on the tank and some new ones to work with so managed to get a matching set. The wheels I had purchased from a dealer some years before having been assured that all new bearings and seals had been fitted. The wheels had been blasted and painted for another project but the customer decided he wanted spoked wheels so these ones became available. The tyres were poor but I always intended to replace them. As it turned out, the bearings were far from new, only about half of them were usuable. Indeed one, a taper roller outer race (both taper roller and ball races were used) had been sand blasted whilst fitted in the wheel. There was od paint in the rust pits when I took it apart! Still, such are the joys of tank restoration. Here are the bogies fitted. The return rollers and skids were fitted later. Now the hull was moveable and before I put the front back in, I wanted to complete the interior as much as possible. This required the manufacture of most of it as anything less than four inches from the floor had rusted away. I started with the engine bay, making new stainless steel fuel tanks and new cover plates. I made the left tank as original with the full 58 gallon capacity but the right tank is only 25 gallon. The problem with long fuel tanks is the surface area of the fuel allows a large evaporation and with fuel going off so quickly, a small tank makes better sense. Both tanks are usable and I run off whichever is most appropriate. The wiring is all new as are all the fuel pipes. This view looking forward shows the clutch fork and above it the muffler for the Homelite Auxiliary generator. The exhaust passes through a small pipe set into the radiator and out of the back of the tank. This view looking back shows the fuel filter. It is a bigger version of the one fitted to Dodges. Hardly a surprise as they were both Chrysler products. This is the drivers area and shows some of the wiring to the instrument panel. I managed to save all of the Cannon plugsand flexible conduits, just renewed all of the conductors. This is the rear left hand corner of the fighting compartment and is where the generator and regulators live. The other regulator is for the aux gen. This is a two stroke unit with it's own fuel tank above.

I'm sure you're right but also the turbines would be cheaper, more reliable, lighter, thereby giving a greater payload and as the airframe has no fatigue index, anything to extend the operational life must be worthwhile. Your time down there sounds very interesting, what were you doing?

You picked the right screen name......

When you said you had seen it at a Steam rally I thought 'you did?' That would be Jim Clarks with, as you say, a radial.

That is in Chryslers museum. They found an engine in Argentina after I gave them a tip off though even they had a job importing such a weapon of war.:argh: I sent them a CD with a recording of my engine as they wanted to do an interactive display. Not sure if they ever set it up but it's good to see a manufacturer being proud of some of it's lesser known products.

I think the Tiger is just waiting it's turn. That also applies to the Stugs I would imagine. The Wheatcroft Collection arguably undertake the finest restorations in the world, their Panther has had no effort spared.

Vince, I used a press! They had been unmoved since about 1950 so there was unlikely to be much of a gap to penetrate. Of course, a couple were free but in general force was need. No damage to bores or rings came about, though there was never any intention to use old rings. I did re-use some of the pistons though, just re-ringed them.

Of course if you had all the mechanical parts to start off with, the purchase makes more sense..... The Tiger 1 is not undergoing any work at the moment.

Absolutely, it's tearing the soul out of a great lady.

It's an air cooled engine so the engine bay gets very hot. With modern petrol, it can be a problem. It will tick over at 500 rpm but that fries the master rod bearing so minimum rpm should be 750 or 1100 for long periods. It wont go as fast as 10,000 rpm I'm afraid!

In Sherman, the 9 cyl. does have a flywheel whereas in Hellcat, the engine in the trailer being for a Hellcat, it does not. There is quite a rotating mass in a radial though and they seem to run fine without a flywheel/club.

A Cent driving on the governer is a sure fired way of ruining it!

There is more about than you might imagine. Most, of course, doesn't go out much. Kevin Wheatcroft does have a fair collection and he does show some, he had his Churchill VII at Beltring and Bovvy this year.

That only applies to the Meteor I and III. The 4B in Centurion is different in many ways though broadly similar.

Naruto, it's not an M4A4 with any other engine!:-D I found no trouble with my transmission, I just replaced the input shaft seal, everything else is like new. I did look at the tyres from Haagsma but so far I have been running on good originals. The new tyres are very good though and I may get some as spares. The problem with my wheels was with the bearings which were supposed to be all new, they weren't! :argh:

I can photocopy bits if you need it but I have nothing spare. Meteors don't have a head gasket in the conventional sense and it was not intended to seperate the head from the block other than at major overhaul.

Thanks guys! Yes, I do have a small engineering business which helps enormously.... On the engine itself, I had to make not just the fan cowl but the top catwalk, the coolant pipes to the pump, a new water pump shaft, all the oil pipes, some sections of exhaust and even a new sump. In fact, we now do quite a bit of this sort of work for others now, not restoration as such but fabrications and repairs. The stands I made for the Sherman but they currently sit under a Ram that we are putting a new floor and bulkheads in. They are 5mm construction as a balance between strength and ease of movement. In the picture, one appears to be on the huh but it is just the light, a view from the other side looks normal. Carl Brown also rebuilt a multibank at the same time as me although he beat me to it, mind you, there was three of them working on it! Carl helped me a great deal with the supply of some parts, it's a bit of a cliche but I probably couldn't have done it without his help, at least not in the same time or budget.

Further parts removal left the inside empty. In this overhead view, you can see the two areas of damage. Top left is a penetration through the sponson floor and bottom right is the crack due to the distortion in the lower side. A closer view of the damage. The hole just required a new section of sponson floor and a repair to the bulkhead. The other damage was much more extensive. A 3 feet section of lower side had to be removed, together with half of the engine bulkhead and 9 feet of sponson floor. I left the transmission assembly in for all of this to retain some hull integrity at the front. This is after the repair. I had to buy in a piece of 1 1/2" plate for the lower side and machine the top edge to match the existing plate. I was very pleased with the result, it is not possible to see the join in the side now. With the repairs completed, I removed the transmission assembly, another 4 1/2 ton lump and carried out all the small repairs to bracketry, stowage and fittings. I tried to reuse as much original material as possible. It was now September 2001 and ready for sandblasting.

As I mentioned, I spent several years getting bits together, the single most expensive was new track and roadwheels. However, the wheels turned out to be less good than I had been led to believe but more on that later. I also spent some time getting the vehicles identity. M4A4s have the vehicle serial number stamped on each towing lug, this gave me 5271, identifying when it was built. There is a correlation between the serial number and the USA reg. number. Mine worked out as 3057081 and some carefull paint removal revealed this. The British number was allocated in blocks with no record or way of working it out so I was pleased to find this. The first job was removal of the turret to allow the stripping of the interior. The turret is held to the ring with 40 1/2" bolts so easy to remove though a bit of a lump at 4 1/2 tons. The gun looks short as the breech ring was missing and the tube had slid back. As can be seen, it is the early M34 mount with the narrow mantlet and no tube protector ears. Removing the turret allows a good view into the fighting compartment, not a pretty site! Next to come out is the turret basket. That was even worse! It was all there, just in very poor condition.

Jack, the picture of the two engines in the shed was May 1999 and it was running on New Years Eve 2000 but I did have most of the summer of 1999 on other things, so about actually about 16 months. Very hard to say in terms of hours, the fan cowl alone took four days work. I estimate the whole project took about 4000 hours but this is just an estimate. Many hours were spent on ranges getting parts which were only any use as patterns only to then have to spend more time making parts from the patterns. I'll start the vehicle restoration itself next.

That's the VII Croc that's now at Muckleburgh.

As can too little nose weight. I had an interesting experience not unlike Clives on the M25 some years ago. I was towing a twin axle trailer with a Range Rover and it started to go.....gave it a bit of power to stop the wild snaking and then drove the rest of the way home at 40 mph.:sweat:

There are quite a few M4A4s around with the original engine but only four are currently running to my knowledge anywhere in the world. The Tank Museums Firefly and Crab both are potential runners, IWM has restored the engine from its tank and there are a couple of restoration projects recently started in the UK.

It's 8 gallons of SAE30 and 27 gallons of coolant. I keep it at 35% anti-freeze all year round.

The next step is the gear case. The herringbone gears run on roller bearings but the gears bore is the outer race and the pin is the inner race for the bearings rather like a motorcycle big end. The problem with this is any pitting on either componant is a bad thing. Fortunately, the gears from my tanks engine were perfect. The gear case is offered up on the studs untill it goes tight. At this point the studs increase in diameter to become dowels and it is time to 'time' the engine. There is a plug in each gear position to ensure the timing marks are all in line. The manual is a godsend in this respect as it makes it very easy to do. The firing order is progressive throughout all the engines and whilst the firing order of each block is 142635 i.e. the reverse of normal due to the reverse rotation, the overall firing order is 1 on eng.1, 5 on eng.3, 3 on eng.5, 6 on eng.2, 2 on eng.4 and 4 on eng.1 and so on. This gives a firing impulse every 24 degrees making it very smooth. The next thing to do was the engine wiring harness. This was quite complicated as the engine has a plethora of gauge sending units. There is a water temp. sender in every head as well as a high temp. warning switch, an oil pressure sender, an oil temp. sender and an exhaust temperature switch on each manifold. These are known as stack lights and are to give the driver a warning if one block is not firing. The lights on the dash are the same as a Dodge Hi-beam warning light. I made a new harness using Nyvin wiring which handles the high temperatures well and wrapped it all in braided sleeving as per original. It all terminates in a 14 pin plug above the starter motor. The cross shaft on the engine is for the choke linkage. The next step was fitting ancilleries such as the five distributors, coils all nos and the rebuilt water pump. The pump required a lot of work as two of the outlets were broken off. I had to build five carbs from 11 as despite being nos, they had sat outside for many years. The starter motor was probably the hardest part to do as it was very corroded and the brush holders had rotted away but I found a more modern motor had the same parts and just swapped them over. The last major bit was the radiator. I knew I had to have a new core so having stripped all the tanks off, I sent it away and Sercks made a good job of a new one. I repaired a few shrapnell holes in the header tank and assembled the new core with new bolts and gaskets. With the radiator on and connected up, I was nearly ready for a test run. The clutch is the same as a radial engine clutch so I managed to find a new flywheel and some parts but had to reuse the pressure plate. With new springs it all functioned correctly. I welded the broken blade back on the fan and fitted it all together. Jumping forward in time slightly, I managed with thanks to the Tank Museum, to borrow a fan cowl from their display engine. This enabled me to make a copy. It's a complicated double skinned affair with an airfoil section and is close fitting to the fan. Back a year or so..... I set the engine up on it's trolley and rigged up a Valentine oil tank, a jerry can and two batteries..... It all worked!:yay: Well almost! I checked the exhaust manifolds and one was cold but it was just a stuck carburetor float valve so that was easy to fix. I did think it was only running on 24.....:rofl: This was Dec 31st 2000, a great day!