Caddy

I think either you must be a lucky huddersfield man or I was an unlucky Essex boy! I still hated having to use it; it used to get stuck everywhere, could never do more than power a hay zip. It was not a small thing either, and only the basic controls would work. Give me a John Deere any day! (Hell I might even take a New Holland)

Well I used to, but now I have to love being in the office to keep the paperwork flowing..... ....Ahhhh management.

I manage a high quality urban park in London, and carry out a role as Authorised Person for Confined Space entry...... .... I have to say that running a £13m park is easier than the CS stuff.

It seems to me that certain people want to Maurauder over this thread and create quite a bit of Havoc.......

SLightly off topic, but both the Centurion and Conqueror have David Brown boxes..... David Brown did make hateful tractors though........

Hi, Does the Chieftain's main brakes need the engine running to work? On Sunday I was asked to remove the master cylinder out of our Chieftain and strip and clean it. Apparently the thing was siezed. So I stripped the moving parts down, cleaned them up, and re-assembled them. All moving smoothly. I haven't touched the hydraulic side of the master cylinder yet. When I re-installed the cylinder I tried the pedal and it was still solid. The pedal itself is quite stiff, but I can't see this being a problem. Any thoughts?

Lauren, At least they're rope'd in! Free Climbing?! I climb trees for a living and that made me feel so ill. Not for me......

Will you be brining it down to IWM's Military Vehicle Day? Might need it to recover our Conqueror if it get's stuck in 3rd again...........

Blimey, well they don't look that similar. There's a couple of M120's in storage at Duxford next to a couple of meteors and they do look different. I knew that they had the same capacity, stroke and bore. Didn't know if they'd share a common bottom end though. Are the cam profiles different? Would have thought so. Still how many engines have kept the same trousers but changed their shirts......

M120 is quite a different beast in some ways to the meteor. Looks are different, mags are on the other end of the engine. Different pistons, and castings look different. Cam followers, pedastals are the same. I think the firing order is different, but not too sure. Oh and fuel injection, different magnetos and starter motor. Recon it could be classed as the evolution of the Meteor, a bit like an Astra. Whether a 90's one or one from now it's called an Astra, but very different.

Lauren, Thanks for that, it'll help no end. If it's all right by you I'll copy it into .xls spreadsheet so that it will be searchable. The Conqueror engine isn't a Meteor though; it's an M120 (think that's right). There are lots of shared components, but it is a different engine. It'll be good to get lists for both the Conqueror and Centurion so that we can finally sort out what we've got in the way of spare parts.

Just out of curiosity has anyone got the NSN list for the Meteor engine? My Cent list has everything BUT the main engine parts list (apart from 'here's the code for a replacement engine'). We've got a lot of parts we want to sort out, think most of them are for the Conqueror, but there is reputedley cent parts in there as well (probably a lot of cross over). Cheers Paul

40 degrees? Rub it in I've really enjoyed you work, absolutely beautiful.

I think I've seen LV6MT4 used with cent parts. Got a list of cent part in NATO format on .xls file if interested.

I think the one at Duxford is for sale as well.......

Cheers

Well I hope that by Duxford's MV show we'll either have the cent Mk III running or the engine on the test bed running. We can live in hope. There will also be a lot of interesting stuff to see as the IWM has had a huge reshuffle........

You've paid tax?! Best get in touch with Starbucks then :cool2:

You forgot the smut and potty humour, vitally important!

It's come up from IWM London and is going into the Land Warefare Hall.

I think they call that the 'rustic aesthetic' harking back to WWII tannoy systems........ ...... It's crap innit :cool2:

It seemed to be spot on at our end, but then it does take a while for sounds to reach us right up at the land warfare hall.... sounds about right for the fire brigade - sorry Nev!

Good Morning all, The weather did us proud yesterday for Remembrance Day at Duxford. A very good service was held next to a Shackleton. Very moving. A little bit of work has progressed on the engine. Can't remember if told you that M had re-faced the valves and seats in B Bank head. He's happy with the valves, but the seats have a lot of burning and acid damage in them and there is very little meat left to play with. He's going to re-face the seats again to see if they are useable or do we need to change the head? On the HT loom front we went back and did some basic resistance tests with a multimeter as doubt was thrown up as to whether the meger tester was working properly. We found that in general the resistance in the steel cored HT leads was between 0.8 and 1.2 ohms, but when we tested a proportional length of new replacement copper core HT lead that had a resistivity of 0.3 ohm. So we had a quick chat with the committee and knowledgeable members and we were given the go ahead to strip and rplace the HT leads - Lovely! We started on the Exhaust set and managed to get A bank done (including repairing the rubber cover on the flexible conduit), and will do B bank next week. We would have done more, but we all went to the remembrance service and before that about 7 of us had a lovely time crawling all over the jagdpanther whilst trying to get a Chieftain tarp over the blummin thing. Lauren Child has some 'interesting'photos I believe.

As it was a tad wet yesterday I decided to find a job that would keep me dry. I thought that it would be a good day to check all the HT harnesses for the engine. As the Meteor is a derivative of the Merlin it still uses 2 sets of magnetos, harnesses, and plugs. This means that we have got to get a good set of HT leads for both Mags. We could run the engine on one set, but I recon this would lead to a very uneven burn. If RR designed it to run on 2 plugs then who am I to say otherwise. Going through our stock I found that we had 2 sets of exhaust looms and 3 sets of intake looms. (The 2 spark plugs in each cylinder are situated either side of the combustion chamber; 1 below the exhaust valves and you've guessed it, 1 below the intake valves). Out of the 2 exhaust sets one is of our engine and the other is still wrapped up and sealed. With the intake looms one came to us refurbished, one was off our engine and the last off a donor engine. The two from engines are in pretty bad condition, but we could probably make a good one out of the two. I decided that we'd use the rebuilt intake loom and the exhaust loom from our engine. Next step was to break out the Megger and stick 15,000 volts through them to test for continuity and shorting. The intake loom is in good condition. The exhaust had one lead broken but no shorts so I'll strip it and put in new HT cables in. Photos to follow.

Thanks Lauren, You're right about the merlin parts fitting; we've got a quote from Aviation Jersey for all the rings and seals we need, it's quite expensive though (well not that expensive the coolant transfer o rings are only £2.50 each), so we've been asked to find out if there is a cheaper alternative. I'm a little hesitant about using an O ring kit as Rolls Royce designed everything to do a specific job, and that included the material used. If we deviate from this path will we increase the likelihood of the engine failing?