G'day Dibble
In answer to your first question; Yes, Australian track is bigger than British and therefore other track.
The distance between the "Alligator" spines is greater and the spines themselves are higher.
Fitting British track to an Australian carrier has catastropic consequences for your road wheels.
As I am sure that fitting Australian track to a British or other carrier would also produce dire results - most likely the track would throw at that point constantly as it would become loose as it passed the Australian sections.
I was involved in the restoration of the South Australian Military vehicle museum's carrier that Bob Moseley did most of the work on.
To unseize the track we used oxy-acet. and a pnuematic hammer. Heating each link then driving them whilst still warm with the hammer, back and forth, until the pins came completely out. Heating this way also removes any traces of the lead plug that may be in the locking grove.
Then each pin was linished on a wire-wheel.
Any cracked or worn links were built up with cast iron welding rods in an arc welder.
Once all of the links had been broken they were assessed as to their condition and graded into piles ( good, fair, bad, unusable ) Fortunately someone had sourced a few more links than required and we had some backup track to use the link from.
In reassembly, one link was taken and fitted in sequence ( obviously discarding the unusable track ) So I think in this case it was 1 good, 1 bad, 1 good, 1 fair, 1 good. we made up sections of 11 links then lay them all out on a large piece of flat floor. The most critical thing is to get both tracks equal in length. So sections were joined and unjoined if neccessary until the tracks were even.
They were then rolled and layed on their side plug side up and once again, the oxy was wheeled out, and lead-tin ( I think they were 60/40 ) soldering rods were melted into the pin hole. Once it hit the cold pin end and the track it sets making a track plug that completely fills the area, but just to be sure we slightly overfilled the hole so that it formed a nice meniscus bead on top of the link and this too was allowed to cool before being peaned with a decent hammer into the hole further.
The result of all of this work was track that performed extremely well at Corowa 2005. In fact, coincidently, on the YOTC DVD, just as John Belfield speaks about 60 year old track, and driving on rusted ol' track, the carrier with the completely reworked track from SA is shown.
As for the Hydraulic braking system on Aussie carriers... it was limited to one model that didn't have displacement steering. So it is infact skid steer like one of those small bobcat loaders. Apparently it did not receive rave reveiw in its time as the vehicle used brakes for steering and stoping, therefore wore through them at a much higher rate...unless only one side works and you can only turn one way....like Bob Moseley and his mates at Corowa '05. hehehe
Picture is of braking mechanism on Australian MGC Local Pattern No 1 hull no. 0005
Pedr.
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