And so we’re back to the BT-7 again.
Driver certainly has a fairly novel way of getting in and out.
You just remove the entire front hatch
Still, I guess, if you have to get out in a hurry, the normal method is you hold on to the 45mm and you use that to haul yourself up and out.
As long as you’re not actually in the process of driving this, it’s actually kindof comfortable.
My only concern is when I put my foot on the clutch, my knee is way up in my face,
and there’s so much fluid floating around down here I’ve got no traction on my knees.
The only other point to note is that one does not get a lot of comfort from the solidity of the armour.
However, that said, let’s have a look at the panels and we’ll see what makes it work.
Controls for the driver/mechanic are pretty much standard, at least to start with.
Clutch pedal.
Brake pedal, which also doubles as the hand brake, and the accelerator on the right, of course you have a gear shift.
Three forward, one reverse.
Steering is conducted by use of the two handles, left handle/right handle of course would be to steer left/steer right.
The first pull is going to be just to release the clutch.
Second pull will actually apply the brake.
Now, this is all very well and simple until you realize that when you have no tracks,
the application of the brake to the final drive isn’t going to do you enough good.
So what you need to do then is steer the front wheels.
This is done by use of a steering wheel.
You simply slide it on, release the safety lock, tilt upwards, and all of a sudden you are now steering your tank.
Kind of neat, actually.
I am not, however, entirely overjoyed by the presence in here of a sledgehammer.
By reputation, to get it in gear, you had to whack it.
I did not bring this in here, this was left here by the previous driver.
I’ll just put the safety interlock back in here, I don’t want the wheels spinning when we’re driving along on the tracks.
Panel on the left hand side, couple of different components.
Actually we’ll start off way down here with the master power.
You push down, master power is now moving through the system.
Push in, master power is off.
Once your master power is on, your ignition switch for the main engine is here.
To get it going, crank the magnetos.
That’s this little yokie here.
The all-important ‘horn’ button.
Push this, horn go ‘beep’. Or ‘honk’. Or whatever horns do.
Light switch! You need one of those too.
And there is an intercom system in the tank.
With this, the driver could select which person he was going to talk to on the intercom.
As we go around, and I should add this ammeter gauge is not original, we’ll see down at the bottom another unique feature on the BT.
You will recall that on the Chaffee there were two engines, but only one speedometer.
Well, in this case, we’ve got one engine and two speedos.
How is that possible, you can only go at certain time.
Well, what they’ve done is that there is a wheel speedo and there is a track speedo,
and depending on which one you’re running at the time, you’ll look at the appropriate one.
And you’ll note also it’s not your typical dial.
It’s actually a ball, for lack of a better term, which shows you your speed.
Other things, we’ve got oil pressure, fuel pressure, oil temperature and a rev counter.
That’s basically it for the instrument panel.
Last thing I’ll note in here, this big lever is a fuel primer pump, so before you crank the magnetos,
you pump up and down on the fuel a few times, watch your fuel pressure gauge increase, and that’s when you know that you’re ready to start.
That’s it.
Now, please ignore the big engine behind me.
And also another instrument panel behind me.
When they dug this thing out of the swamp in 1999 or so,
when it was -30 celscius, they weren’t all that interested in getting everything all that right.
The engine unfortunately either did not survive the immersion, or did not survive the recovery.
So in order to get it running, they replaced the engine entirely and put something bigger and better into it.
Which means that it doesn’t really fit into the engine compartment and projects into the crew compartment.
The batteries have been moved out of the rear of the vehicle and are now where the ammunition stowage used to be, under the turret floor.
And lastly they had to install an entirely new instrument panel which, if you’re looking around the tank, you’ll see on the right hand side.
Not much else in here really.
We have stowage compartments for the coaxial machinegun.
Behind me you can see ammunition for the 45mm.
And that’s it.
Next stop, turret.
Our last stop is the turret.
Now, although it looks kind of roomy, bear in mind this is not a complete vehicle.
The most significant thing this is missing is the recoil guard
which would come all the way out here to stop crews losing their shoulders when the gun comes back.
So if I sit straight forward you can see how far out my shoulder is compared to the gun.
It’s going to be a very, very narrow experience.
Combine this with the fact that there is no floor, or no turret floor, there’s no basket, just the ammunition that you’re on top of,
and things suddenly get very cramped indeed.
Traverse, simple enough.
You have a travel lock which you disengage.
There are two speeds for the wheel, a high range and a low range, and you use one to traverse quickly, the other for laying.
To select between the two, you pull out or push in the wheel.
Unfortunately, broken on this system.
There is an elevation travel lock as well, which is currently applied… disapplied.
And elevation and depression is very simple.
Incidentally, this is also how you secure the driver’s hatch for a road march.
What you’ll do is elevate the gun, swing up the driver’s hatch, lower the gun, engage the travel lock...
there you go…
and that will secure the driver’s hatch in place and prevent it from falling forward and slamming the driver in the head
which probably would be a significant emotional event.
The gun itself, 45mm, a very common gun of the Red Army of the late 30s.
To fire it you had foot trivvers.
If for some reason the foot trigger didn’t work, you could manually set off the gun by pushing this handle forward.
Coaxial machinegun on the right hand side.
If you look at the ammunition that’s available, you really get the impression that the coax was the primary weapon system.
The loader has 7 rounds of 45mm available to him,
and an additional 38…. 44 minus 7, there’s my mental arithmetic for you, scattered around the hull.
Lots and lots of coaxial ammunition drums.
In the turret, in the driver’s compartment, under the hull floor, all over the place, the coaxial seems to have been the primary weapon system.
Of course, loading that was the loader’s responsibility as well.
Outside of that, visibility outside.
You have tiny little slits with terrible, terrible visibility, which I guess is still better than nothing at all.
Commander’s panoramic sight up here, simple enough.
And beyond that, the last thing you have are these little pistol ports, there are three of them scattered around the vehicle,
and are undone by simply twisting and the thing will fall out.
The last thing I’ll mention is the rear of the turret, that’s where the radio would be.
Beyond that, very simple seats, no turret basket.
Simple gun, point and shoot.
What can go wrong?
I think that concludes our tour of the BT, so we’ll hop outside.
So that’s the BT-7.
Probably the most unique vehicle you’re ever going to see on the Hatch.
How many were built seems to depend on who you ask.
I’ve seen numbers from 3,000 to almost 5,500.
It was certainly a mainstay of the Red Army at the beginning of the war.
However, with this much armour, and a little 45mm gun it just wasn’t going to hack it.
So it was withdrawn from service,
but the design evolved a bit through a couple of intermediary tanks into the T-34 which basically won the war for the Red Army.
So I hope you found the tour informative.
I’ll see you on the next one.