[Big D]

Hi all,

I was reminded recently that it has been many months since my last update. I have been tied up with work on an M20 and a White Scout Car, and now I am in the process of moving house and workshop. It could be a while again before my next update but here’s a rundown of a few things I’ve done recently.

I had seen wartime photos of the ammo trays for the .50 cal ammunition fitted onto the M8 gun rings. I had been given a NOS ammo box tray (thanks Mike) and wanted to make use of this so I fabricated a bracket to mount it. From what I’ve seen on wartime photos, just about anything seemed to go for mounting the ammo box trays around the gun ring, so I just came up with a simple bracket for mounting that tray to the gun ring. The clips on these trays are too short to use the M17 ammo boxes so I painted and stencilled some standard .50 cal ammo cans and will use one of those in the tray.

Thanks to Jon and Dave, I received all the parts to make up the 37mm cleaning rods. I do have some bits and pieces for these left over if anyone needs them.

I picked up some R-14 receivers which I have added wiring looms to (thanks again Jon). I have fitted these to the tanker’s helmets which I will use with the interphone on the vehicle. This setup will be better than the HS-30 headsets I have.

I’ve added a water can and NOS MS aerial set in a BG-56A bag to the vehicle as well as picking up the correct type of oil can for the engine bay. I also picked up some NOS legs for the barrel on the automatic choke linkage.

While the M8 has been sitting I noticed that hydraulic fluid had been seeping from the throttle master cylinder. I hadn’t been too concerned about it as this M8 had a piece of the floor missing in that area which I had covered with a plate and the fluid had been leaking through there and onto the floor of the workshop, rather than pooling in the vehicle. I know need to get onto repairing this. The master cylinder that I had used was a NOS one but that had lasted only 18 months or so before it started leaking. Rather than removing that master cylinder and rendering the vehicle immovable, I decided to pull out the other master cylinders I had and rebuild those. I have about five of them but only one looked like it was NOS but pretty rough in appearance. I managed to track down some NOS rebuild kits for these and the cups in these kits look to be in really good shape. I decided to send the cylinders off to my brake specialist and he is going to sleeve a couple of the cylinders and rebuild them with the new kits. I need one for the M8 and one for the M20.

I’ve also noted that my brake woes aren’t completely over. One or two of the wheels have some slight seepage from the wheel cylinders but the front wheel on the driver side has a good leak and is leaving a pool of fluid on the floor. You might recall I used English made wheel cylinder cups on the wheel cylinders on the co-driver side of the vehicle, and Spanish made cups on the wheel cylinders on the driver side. I would have to say the English made cups look to be holding up much better. I don’t intend to tear down that wheel assembly at this stage and will sideline that job for later on.

That’s it for a while again. I’ll pick things up again once we are settled into our new place.