question Bruce Parry Siberia

[marmon]

Silly question I'm sure but who can tell me what vehicle that was and the rough year? The one that threw and then broke it's track.

 

I want one!

Q

[Stone]

Hah, I wondered if anybody here would have seen the programme

 

It was a heavily-civilianised MT-LB - if you look closely (or at the HD stream on iPlayer) you can see where the rear superstructure was added onto the existing chassis. Looks like they removed the whole of the original roof and then butchered the front to put a truck windscreen in - I suspect off a ZIL! The two angled sides at the front had doors put in for access to the driver's compartment - it ended up a bit of a strange shape :nut: You see quite a lot of similar ones advertised on Russian sites as they get used for logging etc - usually converted to a pickup shape with an open cargo area.

 

Identified by the six BMP-style roadwheels and the track type - it was an MT-LBv which is the winterised one with extra-wide tracks. Ask paulob for chapter and verse as the lucky sod's got an Iraqi one

 

My favourite was the bit where their first instinct when it started shedding a track was to hit it with a sledgehammer! :cool2: If they'd just driven backwards at that point it may well have reseated itself.

 

Stone

Edited January 4, 2011 by Stone

[marmon]

Thanks for the info Stone, what a great old vehicle and from your link I see it is also amphibious, though I doubt I would try in that particular one! Funny when it first rattled, chuffed and lurched onto the screen I thought blimey the tracks look loose... Got some character though, I would love one, how I would explain it to the Mrs and what I would do with it is another matter...

 

Cheers,

Quentin

[Stone]

He did explain that the drivers needed some practice!

 

To drive one perfectly you need three hands, both feet and a lot of coordination / concentration, though I dare say it gets easier the more you do it You have pedals for clutch, (common) brake and accelerator, two conventional tillers and a strange 'L'-shaped gearstick which saves you also needing a right arm like a chimpanzee due to where they put the gearbox. The gears don't engage unless you double-declutch as the first down-up motion of the clutch only disengages the current gear and you need a second one to select the next gear.

 

The tillers have three positions - forward (normal), middle (engages a second, lower, gear ratio in the final drive) and rearmost (engages the track brake on that track). Normally you turn by pulling one tiller back into the middle position so that track is in a different gear and slows down, yanking harder if you need to brake the track for the turn radius you want.

 

When you let go of the tiller it stays in the middle, so you have to push it back to the first position before you can steer in the other direction (pulling the other tiller just puts both tracks in the low ratio so it goes in a straight line!). This means a common learner mistake is not being able to exit a turn and instead plowing straight into whatever you were steering around :-D

 

Once you've mastered the system it seems fairly robust though - doing most turns using the low ratio in the final drives means that both tracks are driven throughout the turn and avoids wearing the brake pads down. In low ratio and first gear they'll go up or over pretty much anything, and the shape of the front means you can enter water at speed and the bow wave just gets thrown forwards, instead of landing in the driver's lap like in the 432.

 

The 2S1 howitzer uses the same system - it's based on the longer chassis of the MT-LBu but with the MT-LB front end - and you can go to Tanks-A-Lot if you want to play with one. I suspect driver training is the reason that (on the 2S1 at least) there's a hatch over the gearstick so an instructor riding on the top can change gear for you :cool2:

 

They are fantastic fun once you get over the controls, my lottery purchase would definitely be one of the variants

 

Stone