Armour Dreams

[Lynn Eades]

Mike, Carrier access plates had hex bolts up from the underside. Maybe the thinking was that they would be removed quite often and an eye kept on the bolts and replaced as required.
Everyone seems to be using this line all the time around here: "It is what it is"

[Jonathan Moore]

Morning,

Tony,
I hadn't planned on putting any insulation on the fire walls and as far as I can tell the original didn't have any but I may need to. If I do, the only wall that it would make any sense to insulate would be the one that faces into the crew compartment.

Mike,
I Have to agree with you but somewhere, I can't find it at the moment, is a picture of a Panzer II that has been blown upside down and there are hex bolts on these covers. The other thought would be that the counter sunk screws would have been slotted and would have become filled with all types of shti making them very hard to undo.

Thanks for the interest,

Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening,



I have been working on the radiator / fan assembly and it's become quite interesting, if that's the word. I am making it as one unit, so that it can be removed as one unit, once the coolant has been drained, leaving the oil coolers in place. There's lots of parts, so lots of pictures but we are bit limited on MLU with pictures.

The first pictures are of the fan outer bearing housing

[Jonathan Moore]

This is then welded into the fabricated fan housing.
The fan isn't attached I just placed it there so that you can see where it will go.

[Jonathan Moore]

The actual fan bearing housing, which gets bolted into the outer housing. It's made using the same sequence of processes as the outer housing but is machined all over.
As a complete unit it has a bearing and oil seal in each end.

[Jonathan Moore]

The beginnings of the cooling unit.
The oil coolers will sit under the radiator.

I can't do much more until the fan pulley turns up, when that appears I can make the fan assembly shaft and the get the position of the fan pulley in line with the engine pulley, then I can finish the main unit. Other than that, there are a myriad of holes to be drilled for the coolant pipes etc. and of course, all the air ducting covers.

Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Morning David,

I have no hard evidence but I think that the crew compartment, above a certain line, would have been ivory, I cant remember the paint number off hand and everything else would have been red primer or grey. It would seem to make sense that the crew compartment needed to be as light a colour as possible so that it gave the crew a chance of seeing what they were doing. I have been sent some pictures of the interior of the Tank museums Panzer II, which appears untouched and this backs up this theory. However, where I have painted the inside of the mantlet ivory, theirs appears to be Panzer grey.

Jon

[David Dunlop]

Jonathan.

Nice looking progress. I am curious about the interior colour scheme of these earlier German tanks. The later, bigger models typically had a two tone interior finish with a white/cream turret interior and hull area down to roughly the sponson line, and then just the red primer below that level.

What was the thinking in this regard with these earlier marks?

David