How To: Restoration of Ford M8 armoured car US Ordnance number 7373

[Big D]

Hi Colin,

Many thanks for that. Some really good food for thought there. I do like the idea of keeping those side sponsons intact and as original as possible, and that would certainly be a way of doing it.

The only drawback I can see with not removing the side sponson panels is that there is very limited access to the inner parts of channel etc in the hull and actually trying to join those pieces from inside the hull will be very difficult I'd say.

I'll go back to the engineering guys and have a talk about these options. The discussion certainly brought up lots for me to think about.

Thanks all!

[Big D]

Hi Andrew,

Apologies. I must have been replying to the posts from Dave, David and Terry and I completely missed your one. Thanks for the reply. It's interesting that there are a number of thoughts about how best to deal with this. I'm picking that in the hands of a good welder (not me) any one of these options will work.

As I say I'd like to keep it as original as possible but at the same time don't want to have to take out a mortgage to pay someone to do it! That is the benefit of the whole panel replacement approach, that's for sure.

Thanks Andrew. I'll let you know how I get on.