Armour Dreams

[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.