[ Restoration Passion and the T-62 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am joined today very graciously by Scott from Battlefield Vegas.
We ... just posted a video about this T-62 and going through all the guns on it.
And it was really cool, but I think it's important to point out to people that
this isn't just about like, "Oh, we're going to go drive over cars and blow up stuff."
There's a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of very real history
that goes into making something like this happen.
How many T-62s are there that are operational in private hands in the US?
- To our knowledge, one. This one. - This one, yeah.
And you are the guy primarily responsible for making that happen here, right?
- Yeah, well obviously I couldn't have done it without the help of everyone on my team,
and those guys that supported us, but yeah, that's essentially what happened.
- So where did this thing come from? How does a T-62 get into the US?
- So ... the story of this tank is quite long,
but obviously it was of Russian origin, Soviet time.
And Syria bought several batches of T-62s,
some directly out of the factory, some were used prior.
Our best guess is that this came out of the factory thanks to something Nick pointed out earlier,
but [on] that point we're not too sure.
But we do know for sure that it went on to serve with the Syrians in the Valley of Tears in '73.
- I think you said earlier that the gun's dated '71, so it's like a '71/'72 production gun.
- Yeah, it's a 72A ... and we're all thinking OK, it's a 1972.
But ... we learnt a lot more about this tank that is not written, and hasn't been spoken of,
because not everybody completely strips a tank
to a million pieces and then starts going through it.
So we found evidence, and tags, and whatnot,
and we actually found a 1971 year model on the gun. - OK.
- So as far as the history goes, it was in the Valley of Tears,
obviously the big tank battle everybody knows about.
And this survived that battle, notwithstanding some damage of course.
And it later went on to stay [in] service in the Syrian military,
and then it went to Lebanon in 1982. - OK.
- At that point in Lebanon it was captured by the Israelis,
and held in various scrapyards and whatnot that they had.
And an interesting side note is this red writing,
along with many other markings on the tank is actually Israeli, Hebrew.
So the Israelis got all the tanks that they captured,
and they added their own serial numbers on there,
and you'll see those on the front and the back.
But what this writing is here, to the best research that I've done and been helped with,
is this is directions of where this tank will go
because it has been earmarked for a Tiran conversion.
- OK. So the Israelis kept and used captured Soviet [armour]. - Oh yeah, oh well and truly.
But I'm guessing because of that late time period, although this was marked,
"Yeah, it's definitely suitable to be converted to a Tiran, very little damage,"
for whatever reason they didn't.
The way this tank began its private life was this was the only Syrian T-62
that was imported by the A.F. Budge Collection during the 80s into the UK.
The same gentleman that imported that large batch of M50 Shermans that we covered recently.
Although he imported I believe about 12 M50s, some various other vehicles,
but he only got the one T-62. - OK.
- So from that point it went from the A.F. Budge Collection to various museums,
including the Littlefield Collection, and we bought it off a gentleman back east.
... At that time, nobody had really done any kind of restoration to it.
It ran, but it was in very poor disrepair, and it was de-milled.
So at Battlefield we've done a ground-up full restoration and live-fire gun.
- Nice. There's a cool thing on the front that I want to show people. - OK.
- Alright, so you said you re-militarised this, you put a brand new barrel on this thing, right?
- Brand new is a stretch, but we put a good barrel in it.
- I suppose it's got a little bit of wear and tear on it there, doesn't it?
- Correct. So we actually have two T-62s.
The other one was one of Saddam's Republican Guard tanks that was a Gulf War bringback.
That tank fortunately had a reasonably good barrel in it,
and we basically conducted a gun swap as part of our remanufacturing process. - OK.
- So that damage you see right there came from Gulf War One. - OK.
There was some cool original battle damage to the original gun, yeah?
- Correct. So the original gun the reason that we couldn't use it
is I believe it was an air-burst round.
But when the tank came to us, we found a large bowed-out section of the barrel,
and it actually had a hole, and a piece of the air-burst round went right through the barrel,
inside and then came back outside.
And it was traversed right over this space right here.
And at first glance this was all just rusted, and we didn't think anything of it.
But I've learned twice now through tank restoration
that even the tiniest little pinhole can mean serious damage.
We later found out that that air-burst round didn't stop right here.
- So yeah, you can see the hole in the upper plate right here.
- Correct. There's a hole right here, and there's splash all around it, hot plasma and metal frags.
Well, the warhead from the air-burst round actually went through the whole entire glacis plate,
or the front armour if you will, down into the housing for the track idling adjuster.
And then went down into the mechanism of the track adjuster.
- Wow! - And locked the whole thing up.
So we cover this on our channel as well,
but there is footage of us, we have the whole track adjuster glowing red.
And it was a three or four day process trying to pull out this track adjusting mechanism,
which is essentially worm gears and you know.
But it was just all locked up from that one round.
- Did you know that was the reason that you couldn't get it off at the time?
- No it was not, we had no idea. We hadn't done the other side,
so we just assumed it was normally that hard.
Until we pulled it out and we found a big copper ... slug right in the middle of the worm gear
... just jammed everything up. - Huh.
So you mentioned your channel, you guys actually have a YouTube channel
documenting the restoration of this and other vehicles, right?
- Correct. - That's super darn cool. - Yeah, thank you.
We have a gentleman that came in recently, and his name is Dimitri.
And he began as a scale modeller,
and as we all know, some of those guys are a bit fanatic with detail.
Dimitri came to us looking for some detail off some of our tanks for one of his builds,
and we couldn't get rid of him.
And I said, ... "If you love this stuff, why don't you work on a one-to-one scale?"
And he ... really wanted to be here, he was a tremendous help.
So he got involved, and he began to film everything that we did
because we can't, we're too busy working.
And ... we're upcoming, but it's a growing channel. ...
- It's fantastic. - Yeah, Restoration Passion. - That kind of says it all.
Like the point isn't, "Let's go run over a car," like I keep referencing back to.
It is like there's real work, and real history, and real mechanics.
And there's a tremendous amount to learn from digging into a vehicle
in the sort of depth that you guys have with one like this.
- Yeah ... again, our main focus is the restoration,
and we do a lot of walk around videos in extreme depth,
a lot of nuts and bolts, how things work.
We do also cover ... again, we're one of the very few who do full operational capability,
and a lot of people ... aren't here to cover that.
So Restoration Passion covers the whole restoration,
including what it takes to make a demilitarised main gun live again.
- That's fantastic. - And you can see all of that on our channel.
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but even a lot of high-end museums will typically
restore a vehicle mostly visually because it's going to be a static display.
So you want to make sure it looks right and the paint's right, but the internals,
nyah, but you guys ... like all the electronics in this thing work.
The electric turret traverse works.
You've actually got the solenoid firing mechanisms for the coax gun
all set up and working, that's really cool. - Thank you, yeah.
... Again ... we have a really rare opportunity with the way our business is structured.
And again, there's many tank restorers out there from varying degrees
of just a really nice paint job of a static display, to operating and driving.
And some guys go to extreme detail to get that all original finish,
but for various restrictions of wherever they live
or where they might be located, they can't do the main armament.
So my opinion that's like restoring a car, and not ever being able to drive it.
We're restoring a tank, and the tank wasn't designed to drive,
the tank was designed to carry this thing. - Right.
- So we are incredibly fortunate enough to bring every single aspect of the tank back to life.
So on this one here we went through and restored night vision capability,
we've got the crew commander's target designator override function working.
- That's so cool. - The auto-eject sequence works,
we're actually just ironing out a few issues on there right now.
But I feel very fortunate that we are one of the very few
at the top level that can take a tank fully to its operational capability.
- That is fantastic. So thank you very much for the access. - Thank you, man.
- This was a real hoot to drive, to shoot.
And definitely I will have a link to Restoration Passion down in the description text.
Check them out for like a seriously nerdy level view of vehicle restoration,
which I know a bunch of you guys are going to be interested in.
Thanks for watching. - Thank you.