[Big D]

Hi all,

Here are a few pictures of the latest progress. I have fitted the recoil system and elevation system. I found the elevation system and sector gear on the recoil system had to be fitted at the same time. I had the elevation gear in first but I couldn’t find a way to fit the sector gear for the recoil system afterwards as there was just not the room to make them mesh unless installing them together.

The 37mm racks, map clips and binocular holder are fitted, but I will need to remove the rear 37mm rack to lift the turret onto the hull. As you’ll see the binocular holder is white. From what I could see these were white on earlier M8’s and then green on later ones. Someone may correct me on that.

The barrel is now straight and the good news is that the damaged part of the tube will be obscured by the sleigh. The breech ring is off and will require some rebuilding.

What is the easiest way to fit the barrel to the gun mount? My thoughts were to fit the sleigh onto the recoil system and then with the recoil system angled downwards, slide the barrel (minus the breech ring) into the sleigh. Is there a better way?

After cleaning up the channels, I test fitted the sleigh onto the recoil system with my fabricated brass channel on the sides. The sleigh will go on, but it will be a snug fit with that new brass.

I finalised the interphone box wiring for the commander and loader. The headphones on these worked straight away but the microphones did not. I worked out that the way I had wired the connector on the FT-237 radio tray (which was as per the TM 11-2702 manual) was actually wrong. I can recall when I did that FT-237 wiring, that it didn’t seem right that the microphone circuits (yellow and brown wires) for the back interphone boxes weren’t on the same line as the interphone boxes for the front. Anyway, I wired them together on the FT-237 and the rear interphone boxes now work fine with headphones and microphones.

I have some of the sheet metal back from the sandblasters, painted and ready to go. Unfortunately, the sandblaster got their wires crossed with the painting. The plan was to blast and paint the tool lockers, as they were ready to fit, but just blast and prime the big sandskirts, because I still needed to apply some fibreglass to them to improve their roughish appearance. The blasters got that the wrong way around and I have a pair of tool lockers which have just been blasted and primed (!), while I have some fully painted sandskirts which still need to be fibreglassed! Oh, well….

I spent a bit of time making the radiator drain plug access flap on the rear lower engine panel. The reproduction panel that I had didn’t have this hole cut in it. Thanks to Willy for his help on the design of this. I received a nice load of parts I needed in the post today (cheers Reg), including the radiator mounts, hydrovac tube and hydrovac repair kits.

The last of the bits and pieces are loaded up and ready to go to the sandblasters for priming and painting.

That is all for today….