T-16 S/N 5399 T.D. 97377 Restoration

[Ron Pier]

Blimey Dave! Is that facility in your back garden...not many of us have that

Also what are those chains coated with? That they come out still blue and yellow. Ron

[horsa]

I wish the place was in my back yard, but they are a 3.5 hour drive from where I live. I would have needed to trailer the hull to a sand blaster anyway so figured the extra drive time wouldn't make too much of a difference in the end. The real incentive is the facility made me a great deal. They had been dipping antique cars for years but had never done something heavy like the carrier. So it was a test for them to see if they wanted to start attracting military vehicle restoration people or not.

We were both really pleased with how the hull came out. And my cost was less than it would have been to sand blast since they made me a great deal for testing purposes. Numbers are all relevant to where you live and the time period we're talking about. Suffice to say they would now charge someone about three times what it would be for sand blasting.

The process is a lot more thorough than sand blasting since it gets everywhere. And the chemicals won't eat good metal so there is nothing lost except for paint, grease and oxidation. Plus no sand residue falling out of all the little holes and channels on the vehicle.

As for the chains, I'm not sure what they were coated with. I know that they were new since they were unsure of lifting the hull with what they had been using before at the shop. But the chemicals sure didn't touch them at all so likely it was a rubber coating of some type. They said the road wheels could safely be dipped since the rubber wouldn't be affected but I didn't want to risk testing them since it would have been expensive to replace them if they were wrong. Went the normal sand blasting route with all of my wheels.

[ajmac]

David,
A great restoration project. Do you have an idea of the weight of the hull in itself? I have excess to the same HC acid tanks through a family member, but he needs to know the weights... as they currently only strip classic cars and industrial paint machinary.

[horsa]

We added up other known item weights and worked backwards from what the total vehicle was supposed to weigh. Estimated the stripped hull at 3500 pounds. The gantry the dip place had was rated for two tons but they said it could probably hold a little more but didn't know it's true safety margin.

They didn't have a scale when it came time to testing things out but said it was easily within their normal weight limits based on having moved other vehicles around with their forklift and the gantry so I guess our initial estimates were pretty close.

You'll notice in the shots that I took the bogie assembly mounting brackets off the lower hull. This was to further lighten it as well as to allow fast drainage of the chemicals due to their weight and added time it would have taken to lower and raise the hull if the liquid couldn't get in and out easier.

[Philliphastings]

Hello David and thanks for the pics. Chemically dipping large assemblies is of course the first choice of restoration techniques but even when I lived right in Sydney, near to a place that could do it (I was building jeeps back then) it was just too costly to have done. I wish I could afford to have the Scout hull dipped as even the sandblaster i hoped to have organised locally seems to have come to nought.

I am likely to have to carry my hull on a car trailer on a 600km round trip to Perth for sandblasting when the time comes...

Congratulations once again on a first class restoration by the way - simply awesome !

Cheers

Phill

[Lynn Eades]

I would suggest a preliminary chemical treatment prior to the sand blasting.
The reason for this line of thought, is that mine has rusted badly in the floor, even though it was white blasted, cleaned, primed and painted, all on a fine dry day. I believe the armour plate forms large holes inside,from tiny pin holes at the surface, that the blasting process has no effect on.

[horsa]

The chemical dipping process can be expensive since they apparently charge by weight and not by surface area. So anything armor will cost quite a bit more than sheet metal panels or small parts and brackets. That could well be part of the reason why they did my hull for such a cheap price as they saw pictures and we talked it up and made a deal before they ever got back to asking how much it all weighed. If the price had been what they want to charge others for the work now, I wouldn't have used the service due to my budget at the time.

But knowing what I do now that it's done and I've seen the results, I think I would still dip it if I were to start another project. The chemicals can clean out areas that sand blasting wouldn't be able to reach.

In terms of what Lynn said about the floor on a sand blasted carrier rusting after the fact, I was worried about that on mine before I found the chemical dip place. Part of my rusty floor looked flat and smooth while other areas were deeply pitted. I tested it with a hammer and was able to break off some of the flat areas and found the wavy pitted metal underneath. So I ended up getting my air chisel and went over the entire floor several times. That left my entire floor wavy and pitted but it was at least solid metal. I figured a sand blaster would only be able to work the exposed metal so didn't want to have a problem later on. Odds are the chemical dipping would have gotten to most of the lower layer on its own but I still would have had problems I think since I'd have primed the upper surface metal that might have broken off later. So I'd recommend anyone planning either process should go over the floor really well before hand. You might tear off a lot of metal but it's not good metal. That way any needed repairs can be done before you have everything striped and primed.

I'm not sure why the original floor was as I found it. It really seemed like a thin sheet of metal had been laid over the thicker armor hull down there at first. And water got between them and rotted one underneath and weakened the upper layer from beneath it. Must be part of the old laminated armor process where the outer edges are hardened and the inside is left mild.