Armour Dreams

[Mike Gurr]

Jon,
Never apologise for your updates, some of us await them eagerly! The longer the better. Not only is your work outstanding and detailed but it is a reminder for some of us to get on with our own vehicles even if we do not have your engineering skills. Keep up the good work.

[Jonathan Moore]

Originally Posted by Mike Gurr

Jon,
Never apologise for your updates, some of us await them eagerly! The longer the better. Not only is your work outstanding and detailed but it is a reminder for some of us to get on with our own vehicles even if we do not have your engineering skills. Keep up the good work.

thanks Mike it's nice to know that you enjoy the updates.

Evening All,

I want to get all the tools, boxes, etc that are attached to the track guards in place before I remove the upper hull, all of the tools are held in place by these clips,

An original and my version.

[Jonathan Moore]

I had thought that they would all be the same and I would just have to make 8 identical clips but in true German fashion, nothings that simple. There are 7 different variations to make, some just bigger or small but others totally different so each one takes a bit of experimentation. They were all lined with felt or similar, so that has to taken into account and that will be riveted in place after they have had a coat of under coat.

That's all for tonight.

Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

One thing that I never throw away is Oak, I can always find a use for it. The panzer needs a jacking block as part of it's tool kit and as I had some large off cuts left over from when I built our extension, out came the chain saw.

[Jonathan Moore]

Most of the original blocks that I have seen have been made from several pieces joined together but I decided to make it out of one lump.

[Jonathan Moore]

I decided to use a new fire extinguisher painted to recreate an original, my thinking is, if there is a fire it would be nice to know that i have the equipment to put it out rather than to look good.

[Jonathan Moore]

The two other items that I have also have added are, the pinch bar and this enclosure that holds a box listed as an Zubehorkasten MG34, so far, i have been unable to find any information on the latter as it appears to be a specialised size to suit the Panzer ll.

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening all,

Not much to report on the Panzer front, as I have been busy with other non military projects that I appear to have gained.

As for the Panzer i have been removing the parts that i have previously made and under coating them ready for a top coat as and when.

A quite interesting little project that i have finished is the rotary coupling that connects power and audio from the hull up into the turret.
I had thought of using a cheap slip ring as sold on ebay and modifying it to suit but i don't think that it will be man enough, so i decided to knock something up myself.

The rotary junction is bolted to the hull floor and attaches to the leg of the commanders seat, the cables then run inside of the seat support leg and into the turret.

I thought that i had taken loads more pictures but it appears that i didn't. This is the rotor and the copper ring connectors, sorry if my descriptive terms are incorrect but i can't think what the individual components would be called.

[Jonathan Moore]

The copper is 35mm plumbing tube pressed over nylon insulators with the relevant wires soldered in.

All the external connectors that i have used are clansman but i couldn't find a female socket, so i used a bulkhead fitting and turned up a two part housing that pushes together and sealed it all by covering it with heat shrink.

The outer housing has a bearing top and bottom and an oil seal at the top to stop dirt getting in but i forgot to take a photo of the completed unit.

The whole unit is housed in a fabricated steel enclosure that will be sealed with silicon on final assembly.

[Jonathan Moore]

That's all for now.



Jon

[Ganmain Tony]

Thank goodness you're back Jonathan.

I was experiencing serious withdrawal symptoms....

Need my panzer 2 fix

[DaveBuckle]

I too regularly check the armour forum hoping to see your updates.
Shames me into getting something (straightforward and simple) done down the shed ...
Great stuff!

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

I have realised that i haven't updated my thread for a while so.

Thanks for asking after me, I appreciate it. I am, as you can tell, still in the land of the living but with winter coming, in the near future, there was a job that I needed to get done and If I have mentioned this before please forgive me for repeating myself, i blame it on my age.

When i built my workshop i built it to suit Land Rovers, so it didn't need to be that high or have tall doors, fast forward several years and the vehicles that i own, build, have got taller and i need more height, so i decided to remove the roof, raise the walls by 2'6" and rotate the roof 90 degrees so that the door would now be in the end of the workshop. It sounds so simple and what i should have done, is make a steel frame and erect it over the whole building and then demolish the old building but i am not that sensible. Of course once the building was water tight, I had to rewire it etc. So that's what i have been mostly doing.

On to more important things. The little time that i have had, i have used to make the frame that would house the radios in the original tank.

With a bit of wiggling I should be able to fit the Clansman boxes inside the reproduction German radio's.

[Jonathan Moore]

As stated before, I am going to be using Clansman intercoms in the tank and the ideal place to hide them is within the radios. I have an original radio but that is of no use as i don't want to ruin it by ripping the innards out, so i have been making a repro set. The radios were housed in the aforementioned frame on the inside of the hull on the right hand side, viewed from the front of the tank.

The radio consists of two units side by side.
So the task in hand is to try and recreate these units but with hinged front plates so that there is access to the Clansman boxes inside. Obviously i am not going over the top with them, as they just have to look the part but still it's a time consuming process.

One of two power plugs next to a picture of a real one.
The units are not finished yet but this is it so far.

[Jonathan Moore]

It's taken me some time but i have managed to get around to fitting the clansman intercoms into the radio's and get the whole lot fitted in to the hull. Once you start on an area, you soon realise that there are a lot more components needed than first thought.
The cable from the aerial to the radio travels from the isolator, (light blue) to a junction box (red), along conduit (green), to a second junction box (red) and then into the radio (yellow). On the roof plate there is a light (mauve) and a further junction box in front of the radios and then there are whole lot of clamps that need making to hold everything on place.
There's still a lot of finishing to do but now that the complicated works done i can spend the cold evenings making the radio fronts look more like the originals.

[Jonathan Moore]

It Took me most of Saturday to find the center of the turret ring on the hull floor and get the slip rig / rotary coupling bolted in place.
Then on Sunday, we placed the turret on to the upper hull for the first time, progress me thinks. Then we took the CMP and Morris for a spin in the sun.

[Jonathan Moore]

The next job is to connect the commanders seat support to the rotary coupling.

Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

Forward, ever forward and to that end I have completed the support that connects the commanders seat to the rotary coupling on the hull floor. It can't be an exact copy of the original because I have had to modify it to suit my version of the electrical connection contained within.

Now don't laugh, I don't usually show the pigeon poo pictures but I have made an exception, before grinding.

After grinding.


And after painting.

[Jonathan Moore]

The support is bent in this unusual shape so that it misses the radio operators leg when the turret turns and yes the space is that limited.

That's all for now.

As an after thought, I have Just constructed a lovely pie for tea. A layer of thick cut bacon, followed by a layer of mushrooms, then a layers of chicken, a layer of cranberry sauce, and finally a layer of sausage meat, with a nice thick chicken gravy poured over the top, topped off with nice red Leicester thick crust pastry. Bloody tasty, I can tell thee.


Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

And my wife has instructed me to tell you, that I made her a vegetarian quiche. Red Leicester pastry, with mushrooms, sugar snaps and sweet peppers, mixed with egg, pepper cream and more red Leicester topped with melted Cambozola.

There, done as instructed.



Jon

[Tony Smith]

Is there nothing you can't turn your hand to?

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening Tony,

I can think of a few but the most frustrating thing is no one, in this part of the world, want's to pay me to make these toys.

Evening All,

2021, it doesn't seem five minutes ago that it was 1982 and I was leaving school to enter the big bad world and if someone had told me what a shit year 2020 was going to be I wouldn't have believed them. But forwards, onwards and backwards. On to the turret rotation gearbox and just to remind you what it should look like.

The top section is the actual gearbox, the lower section is just a guard to stop things getting trapped in the gear that meshes with the turret gear ring. This is what the gearbox housing looks like in my world.

[Jonathan Moore]

The original unit rotates the turret 4 degrees for every turn of the handle, so that's 90 turns to rotate the turret through 360 degrees, which I find quite hard to believe. I would have thought that there was a fine and course setting but I can't find any evidence of this, however I have read that the gearbox could be disengaged from the turret ring so that the turret could be rotated manually by hand. The original turret ring gearing would have been quite a precise component but of course mine has been fabricated, so I am trying to compensate for this by allowing the gear that meshes with the turret ring gear to have a certain amount of horizontal float. To this end, the internal gears are housed in a frame that rotates around the small forward gear shaft bearings, at the opposite end of the frame will be a spring, that puts pressure onto the frame, thus forcing the final gear and the turret ring gear together, I hope.

It's early days but I think that it will work.



Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

Things are progressing steadily in the right direction but not as quickly as I would desire. I attached the light and the power plug in the turret, a small job but another one off of the list and I have been making the components for the turret rotation gearbox.

[Jonathan Moore]

The gear box now has it's attachment brackets welded on.
I assembled the gearbox tonight, just to see how it all fitted, it's surprising how many parts there are and this isn't all of them.
It all appears to fit ok, now I just have to machine all the key ways and make the rotation wheel, if only it were that simple.



Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

At last I have finished the turret rotation gearbox, almost. It turned out to be quite complex but that was entirely due to me being too fussy.

I think the turret gearbox had*three settings, fine, course and hand, by which I mean that you can rotate it by pulling it around, all three would be too*complex for my little brain, so I decided just to incorporate two, hand and fine.**when the lever is in the vertical position the gearbox is in hand and when the lever is push forward or backwards the gearbox is in fine.

** *

**

[Jonathan Moore]

While*I was in the process*of deciding how to manufacture the rest of the components*it occurred to me that when one is concentrating on a target or having coffee, having to hold*the lever down until the gearbox internals*meshed, would be slightly inconvenient.*Therefore I*designed the gearbox internals*in such a way that once the lever is pushed forwards or backwards it locks in place,*leaving the operators hands free. *Inside the gearbox there is a keyed dog*that moves vertically on the main shaft, when*the lever is in the vertical position the*keyed*dog is in it's upper position and the turret can be rotated by hand but when the* lever is pushed forward/backwards the dog is lowered,*the keys can mesh with slots in*the large toothed gear and the turret is therefore connected to the hand wheel thus*being in fine mode.* Obviously trying to get everything*in exactly the right position for the keys and slots to mesh every time would be impossible, so to over come this*I decided to spring*load*the plate containing the keyed dog. If the lever is pushed forward or backward it*locks in position, the plate containing the keyed dog is lowered and being spring loaded, if the keys and slots do not line up,*the springs compress.*When the hand wheel is rotated and the *keys and slots line up, the pressure of the springs*force*the keys into the slots and from then on the turret is*rotated using the*hand wheel.

As clear as mud*but trying to work out how to word it was more difficult than actually making the damn thing, me thinks



Jon

[Jonathan Moore]

Evening All,

Continuing with turret gearbox, the next item that I needed to make was the handwheel. Not quite as simple as around disc as it contains a remote trigger for the MG34. It would have been a casting but as I don't have that option, I fabricated it.
It started life as a flat piece of 10mm thick steel plate which I cut, turned and then added the relevant bosses.

[Jonathan Moore]

A quick grind with a burr and a shot blast made it look something like the original.
Then the wall of the bosses needed to be machine away so that the two are connected as when it is finished a pivoted arm fits in the channel and a slot for a drive key needed machining into the opposite side of the center boss .
The handle obviously contains the trigger mechanism, I made the outer housing from separate bits of 3mm plate welded together and then I ground the outer profile to shape.

[Jonathan Moore]

In the pictures I have just dropped a 6mm bolt in the the top of the handle to show how it operates. When the trigger is pulled it raises a rod which raises the pivoted arm held in the channel of the wheel. The other end of the arm, which is slotted into a rod that runs up the center of the gearbox shaft, is pushed down this in turn pulls and pushes a series of rods linked to the trigger on the MG.
And that's as far as I got today as I promised myself to spend the afternoon gardening.

Jon