The rear of the vehicle, you’re going to start off on the right hand side, you’re going to have a tail light and a white light,
which I presume is for reversing.
Exhaust. One on each side.
You’ll see that it they are coated, to stop people from burning themselves.
If it’s asbestos or canvas I’m not entirely sure, but it is woven material, basically a cloth.
Final drives underneath
Again, like most British tanks of the era, this was rear-wheel-drive, for lack of a better term, so you could top up your lubricants with that.
And we have the solid cast tracks with casting numbers on them.
As you come further over to the side, this is a very simple retention system for the louvres for the transmission.
Jettisonable fuel tank.
The British had a couple of ways of extending the range, especially in the desert where pit stops were kind of few and far between.
The fuel tank was the more successful one, the other one that they had was the rotatrailer,
and a worse implement of war has probably never been devised.
So if you have a couple of minutes to spare and want a laugh, go find, in Operation Think Tank, David Fletcher talking about the rotatrailer,
and he has some very choice words to say on the matter.
Finally, a number of Matildas would also have basically a doorbell or a gong on the outside of the tank.
You would push the button, it would sound an alarm inside the tank, the TC would stick his head out of the tank
and find out who was the infantryman that had disturbed him.
As you follow the exhaust down, you see the two mufflers.
So there’s an exhaust pipe on each side of the tank, obviously, and the two mufflers are staggered alternately,
one facing right and one facing left.
But otherwise, they are identical.
Again, at the back, we have these single-piece links which are bolted into place,
so if one of these breaks you have to unbolt it, put a new one back in.
You don’t have to go after it with a welder or anything. Also, eyelets at the very back, here.
And we have a pipe, from the fuel tank, comes down and enters a feed in the rear hull.
Now, unlike a lot of the Soviet tanks which would have external fuel tanks that weren’t directly fed,
you would have to siphon the fuel in, the British fuel tank was part of the fuel system.
Downside it wasn’t a quick-release detach, you actually had to come around to the back and take these off if you had to.
Next thing we’re going to do is hop onto the back deck and see what propels this thing at its blistering top speed of 15 miles an hour.
I guess we’ll use the mud chutes to get a foothold.
The mud chutes were not particularly successful, the idea was that as the dirt was dragged up from the return of the track,
the dirt would slide down the chute.
Now, it worked fine for sand, but unfortunately the mud chutes did not chute the mud very well.
It was always a bit of a flaw in the design.
But it does seem to be a good foothold.
Easy enough to get up, I have to say.
Right, let’s see if I can open up some of these things
Looks like I can.
This is probably a two-man job.
As a concession to the economic realities of the thirties, and, frankly, also just to shorten the development time,
it was decided to use the engine of a London double-decker bus.
It’s a six-cylinder diesel, inline, and of course the one issue is that because a double-decker bus tends not to weigh quite as much as a tank,
they put two of them in.
So we have two engines. They were initially the AEC of 87 horsepower, then later they went with Leylands of 95 apiece.
The two engines, side by side, are connected through a system here to a single shaft all the way down in the middle here
directly underneath these two pipes which go to the transmission compartment,
and of course the propshaft goes into the transmission compartment as well.
On each side, we’re going to see the two fuel tanks and the oil tanks.
Oil tanks are here with what is the simplest dipstick you’ll ever see in your life.
That’s it.
Not even screwed into place.
Fuel tanks, again, one on each side, this is a pump for priming.
You basically lift up and down and start pumping the fuel in.
To actually fill the tank you lift up the louvres on each side, and I’ll show you that now in a second after I get up.
Diesel system, of course, there are no spark plugs, carburetors though, still, to mix the air and the diesel.
And not really much else in here, the tank engines of the time are pretty simple.
Diesels get even simpler.
Of course everything under here is under big, heavy louvres that you have to lift up just to check the oil.
The fuel tank, as I say, is a little simpler: It’s a simple hinge that you just lift up.
“Fuel Oil”.
Can’t really get that wrong
Still not light.
Nothing on this tank is light.
Crew comfort obviously wasn’t a consideration back then.
Now, everybody meet, Clay, he’s one of the two cameramen here.
You may know him from the “Upgrade your weapon” videos, he’s got another career as an actor.
All right. Three, Two, One.
Thank you, Sir.
So now we’ve got the thing opened up, we can see the cooling and transmission compartments.
Two individual cooling systems, one for each engine.
So you can argue that there’s twice as much to go wrong, but you’ve also got the argument that you can at least limp home on one if you have to.
Although if max speed is 15, I’d hate to imagine how slow a limp is.
Fan underneath, driven mechanically.
The transmission system, it’s a pre-selector system
We’ll have a look at that when we get into the driver’s hole, and the steering system is done by brakes.
No neutral steer or anything fancy like that, and if you look at the brakes they are actually a sort of external drum.
These are the brake pads on the outside themselves, and as you pull back the lever it simply compresses the pads
through the compression system here and that’s how you slow it down.
It’s about as simple a brake as you’re going to find, and you’ll see the size of it, obviously, to hold the weight of the tank.
From here it goes into the final drives and then into the sprocket wheels.
If you want to know what gear the transmission is in,
they were nice enough to mark with a pointer where the gear lever is right now, it’s in neutral.
I’m happy enough that considering this tank hasn’t been run in many years, it was surprisingly easy to open up,
and now I get to put it back down again.
If I can enlist the aid of my beautiful assistant one more time.
Clay?
We’ll start with the middle one again.
Watch your fingers and toes.
Shite.
Hang on, you’ve got two of them.
I can imagine doing this every day, or every couple of hours in the day.
That brings us to the end of the tour of ‘how the machine works’, the next part of the video and see how you ‘make it work’.
We’ll see you on the next one.