the light mark 2 is actually the first
production light tank built for the
British Army before that there's only
ever been prototypes this is actually a
2a they built the mark 2 the 2a and the
to be and there's hardly any difference
between any of them
it's powered by a Meadows six-cylinder
engine at least it was to begin with and
it's a two-man tank
you've got the driver sitting here in
the front and then not an officer
commanding the tank from the turret and
that's the entire crew the tank itself
is built from armor plate like any other
but for the first time Vickers
introduced what they called CTA plate
which they described a cemented tank
armor it was so much tougher than the
ordinary armor but in fact it's only
this what we would now call face
hardened armor so there's hardly any
total difference there at all now when
it was originally built to say it had a
Meadows engine driving through a Wilson
gearbox here at the front and the Wilson
transmission and it made it one of the
few tanks in fact only the British light
tanks have drive to the front sprocket
most of the others you'll find this book
it's at the back but that's only the
British tanks and only with the light
things so it meant that the whole
transmission was here under the front of
the tank or more or less sharing it with
the driver if you like um the other
thing is that about half way through
their lives The Meadows engines were
removed and they were changed for a
rolls-royce 2025 horsepower engine they
thought it would save the tank in
maintenance hang around a lot better it
didn't actually make a lot of difference
and they found the rolls-royce engine
actually wore worse than The Meadows so
this was the only time really they were
ever used and that's why it has a
slightly modified exhaust system to take
the 25 horsepower engine the suspension
is Horstman he uses horizontal coil
springs to keep road wheels in touch of
the ground and the tracks themselves are
made of manganese steel so they'll last
a lot longer than the tracks on ordinary
tanks or Tanks he's really developed up
till then so it was quite an advance and
if
fact it got to the point where the light
tank Eclipse the armored car completely
for a short while and when they brought
back armored cars later they called the
wheel tanks just to make it more obvious
but these light tanks actually did very
well in their time they found that two
men wasn't enough they really needed a
third man but when they put him in the
turret they put an extra machine gun in
as well and then completely create their
own pitch because there was still the
mold enough work for three men to do
loading and firing two machine guns but
there it is it's it's one of the first
of the light tanks using any sort of
production at all and it's quite an
interesting before very small very light
they were not meant to bite other tanks
of course and in fact in those days when
we were busy policing the Empire and
generally creating havoc everywhere we
only needed tanks with a single machine
gun to shoot down the opposition who are
on foot we didn't have to deal with
enemy tanks so the problem never arose
when the second world war broke out and
there was still a few of these around
early in the Second World War in the
desert in 1940 the Australians had to
use some of them because they had
nothing else I don't think it did them a
lot of good but they gave him some to
drive around in that's about all but
that's the only historical sort of use
of them in action that comes to mind
before that they were only ever used for
operational exercises and that kind of
thing notably on Salisbury Plain and to
some extent down on the coast where they
tried to run them without will motor on
the bank floats to see how they would
travel but not really well obviously but
that's really all you can say but like
Mark - it doesn't have a terrific
history but they were quite common in
their day
you