My first carrier: some assembly required

[super dave]

After that came Fabrication, fabrication and more fabrication of brackets and all of the fasteners to put this thing together. When I purchased this project I did not get the lid to this giant puzzle that states ( Fabrication a Welding skills are a must when assembling). I am over 743 bolts I had to get together so far of various lengths as well as the different head styles as to get it back to look as original as possible as most of the bolts I had were in very poor to non existent from the years it was under the ground. I used a lot of the stove bolts as they are similar to the dome head bolts of the carrier but when it came to the counter sunk screws ARRR. as the BSF style is about half the head diameter and depth I had to machine all of the down to size and re cut the slot in them which took a lot of time. Also I machined all of the markings on the ends of the bolts so they looked more like the bolts of the time

[super dave]

A few more parts.



Well that's enough for tonight and tomorrow off to the Calgary gun show where I can look at a lot of cool stuff and see what Rob Love has been up to

[Marc van Aalderen]

Hi Dave,

It looks beautiful already and it is not even finished. Hope we can see the completed project in the near future. Keep up the good work and the photos coming!

Cheers,

[super dave]

Originally Posted by Marc van Aalderen

Hi Dave,

It looks beautiful already and it is not even finished. Hope we can see the completed project in the near future. Keep up the good work and the photos coming!

Cheers,

Thanks, I hope it will be done soon myself as it has been a long haul but see light at the end of the tunnel

[super dave]

Well the Calgary gun show was great and had a lot of goodies, Purchased a few items and even filled robs pockets with a little cash and had a great chat as well as with his side kick Derk.

After the fabrication of those bits I spent some time to straitening out the drivers and gunners bins as they were slightly pretzel shaped from being in the ground, Overall I was very happy with the end result

[super dave]

Now that was done I got all of the vision slot shutters and hardware ready as I had some repo and original pieces that I am using for my carrier. One of the items I cam up with is the specialty screw heads that go through both of the plates and the glass frames. A while back I was at a friends where he was restoring a M3 scout car and it used a lot of countersunk slight dome head bolts and when I looked at them they looked like the ones used on the carrier as I had a couple original ones for comparison. As I was using the specialty nuts on the back side that were of the BSF thread and the scout car bolts were too short anyhow I just cut them down and got some BSF bolts and welded them onto the ends and did a slight bit of back cut on the counter sunk side and presto it worked great and you cant tell the difference.

[super dave]

Now that was done in was time to get ready for another painting session so I decorated the tree once more. There were a lot of little bits and pieces to hang