Armortek

Love the pictures Richard, Certainly has a "Goth" look now

Good update on scraping gearboxes too.

The chain saw effect will be relentless if not maintained

Adrian,

This is the mix screen....

You need to up the 50% to 100% for each line, otherwise you'll only get 100% when the stick is in the four corners, which sounds like the symptoms you currently have.

Adrian.

Spot on Adrian, thats exactly what its like. I'll make the changes and try again.

Many thanks for your help!

Adrian, implemented the changes and it works a treat. Thank you again.

With freshly cut, wet grass and doing some neutral turns, that lovely polished lower hull and tracks are now covered in mud and grass Theres even grass on the inside

Still, looking at the positive, now the bugs are out of the RC system, a long run around is now not in the too distant future!

Glad it worked for you Richard.

Still playing with the gear changes etc in OpenTX but haven't had much time for playing recently.

Adrian.

That we be a nice trick Adrian to implement but a long way off at the moment. I just going to do it by sound at the moment; the card I'm using has the flexibility to do that but that also, is some way off

So over the past few days, I have conducted a few test runs and totalled so far around 1 hour 45 mins of run time. Most of this has been on wet freshly cut grass and tarmac.

She started off looking like this..... She looked pristine........It didn't last long

Have attached a vid below as a sample of the runs; at the end, I've taken a close up of the drive chain. Apologies now for the poor driving and the blasted beeps which I will turn off eventually

2019 #10 test run

I had a lot of interest from passers by who were suitably impressed, noticeably women!! Who needs a sports car when a tank will suffice

Have started a full strip down now to look for any damage. I'll post some pictures later

Ahhh Women," That other great mystery of the universe"
Doc Brown BTTF

and so to the strip down.....

The turret, rear deck/turret tray assembly, glacis plate and the motors were all removed first.

The hull was then moved off the tracks.... Looking at the road wheels first, these were all ok except that the grass and bonded itself to the tyres and there was a significant amount of grass trapped between the wheels themselves; the picture below showing much grass was removed..... The tracks also had grass bonded to them. As far as paint was concerned, it was removed from the foot, horn and the sprocket entry points as expected. A check on the pads showed that they had not worn down to the level of the foot. In addition, some track pins were removed to see if the dry lube had remained..... The sprockets also had paint removed from the expected areas as can be seen....the gearbox also had 2 witness marks and the bush mounting plate, 1...... The idler wheels had paint removed from the surfaces in contact with the track, namely the outer rim and the inside top lip..... As for the motors, before installing, the pinion gear was dry lubed first and then given an extra blob of tacky grease. The securing bolts were replaced with stainless bolts and a spring washer added. None of these bolts had loosened during the testing. The pinion gears themselves seemed ok.... Looking at the motor support bush, light scoring had occurred. neither bush though had been distorted..... So far, there was nothing really of any concern although not certain about the light scoring on the bush???

When I check the bogies however, I found that all the spring assemblies had become disengaged from the control arms resulting in various levels of scratching and indentations. looking closer, I checked the angle of dangle so to speak and found this when I reengaged the spring assemblies..... Clearly, the spring was under too much initial tension; the overall length of that spring assembly was measured as 115mm. After backing off the tension and with a little fiddling and measuring, I found that if 7mm of thread was inserted into each end of the retaining caps, my overall length increased to...... which changed the angle of dangle to this...... That should ensure the springs now stay in position (I hope). Could be worth a note in the manual about the ideal setting position Armortek???

That's one real messy tank Richard, Glad it survived it's work out.

It's gonna need a bit of spit and polish to get it up to what it was. (hummm maybe not the spit).

Great pictures, I'm going to borrow one of them.

Wow.......doesn't time fly when your enjoying yourself. I didn't realise that its been 7 months since my last post!! I'm afraid I found another project to occupy my time, namely an MG TF Anyone whose had one of these will know that when they are running smoothly, they bring a big smile to anyone's face but they can be a right pain in the proverbial when they are not; in terms of frustration levels, they can match the Chieftain hands down Anyway, Kitty is now purring so time to come back to the fold and work on the tank.

Having seen the post on cap badge makers (thanks John & Dave), I ordered Qty 5 14/20 Kings Hussars badges......yes 5, in case I lose some!! The quality of work was incredible for such a small size as seen below; bravo Tony
Now I just need to source some Navy Blue berets, any advice welcome!

The Bank Holiday weather sparked some new enthusiasm, that coupled with the fact that I hadn't been near the tank for 7 months and therefore, a change was as good as a rest

So with chassis stripped down, it was time for a good clean to remove the muck from the trial run 7 months ago and to reset the bogie springs to be a total length of 125mm..... Notice how Kitty (the MG) sneaked into the picture; what a poser she is Then it dawned on me, what do I do next? There was still lots of detail to do that I had known about before and that was before I had seen the splendid work that Charles and John had done since The jaw started to drop when I realised the scale of what I had still do; then it hit me.......STILLBREW.........I had to that as well; the jaw subsequently hit the ground Now I had been thinking about how i was going to do this and regardless of how I did it, it was going to be messy so actually even though I still needed to add more detail, perhaps now was Stillbew time! So I set off assembling the necessary parts; first the bogie springs and then the wheels..... then the rear deck, glacis plate, turret bearing and front mudguards........ Main gun was next....(kitty sneaks in again ) Even with the gun over the rear deck, it still looks huge..... Next i needed to add my reference points on the turret; first the searchlight..... Now I thought the searchlight door was meant to open at 90 degrees to its main body; is that the case? Anybody else find this and if so, how did you fix it?

Next was the ATU....... And finally, the gun sight.... Now I know the ATU is wrong, it should be rectangular instead of square so will need to remodel, however, how I remodel depends on how it sits within the block camo scheme and to determine that, I will need to add the boxes as well as the bazooka plates complete with tie downs! Now the top row of tie downs will need to be changed but more on that later....

Roll on the next Bank Holiday

I suppose like many others, I've spent a few hours pouring over Chieftain photo's trying to pick out that elusive detail that's missing from our models. Me personally however, I take that one step further by looking at things like alignment etc including paint because of the Berlin Camo I will be painting. You only have to look at the picture below to see why..... If anything is out of place, this regular pattern will show it up in all its glory! From tie downs to turret boxes, it must all align if I am to try and replicate the pattern.

I do check other peoples builds especially those that are more advanced in their build process than I am; and whilst I'm admiring some of the excellent work that's been done, I'm also scanning for potential problems that may affect my build........and I found one....well two actually, both relating to the tie downs on the bazooka plates.

There are four plates on each side so we will number them 1 to 4, front to back. When looking at the finished builds, you will see that there is a step in the alignment of the top row of tie downs occurring in the transition from plate 2 to 3 and 3 to 4; that's the first one. The second one relates to the relative positions of the tie downs themselves. When looking at pictures, I consider that you can draw a symmetrical 'V' between the top and bottom row of tie downs; this doesn't appear the same on the model, they appear unsymmetrical!. The picture illustrates what I mean..... The RED 'V' is drawn from the tie downs below the ATU and is to all intensive purposes, symmetrical. The BLUE 'V' however, is not.

Decided to check this out further and made carboard copies complete with hole marking of each plate. A Straight line was drawn through each row of tie downs and then the four parts joined together. Sure enough plates 1 and 2 aligned top and bottom...... Plate 2 and 3 showed a 3mm step..... as did Plate 3 and 4........ A 'V' was also drawn in the same position illustrated above below the ATU and that showed it was unsymmetrical which certainly shouldn't be the case for this position. So whilst visiting a friend in Sheringham, I popped into the Muckleburgh Museum armed with tape measure, pen, paper, phone and of course 'the obligatory mask'. I checked the alignment and found a straight line should be formed with the tie downs. I also measured the relative positions of the tie downs as well as a few of the ATU.

The positional changes were made on my carboard templates and the 'V' below the ATU was again drawn. The picture below shows the as received 'V' (solid line) and what it looked like after the positions were changed (dotted line). I think this demonstrates the need particularly in my case of the need to make changes to the tie down positions. If your not doing Berlin style you can probably get away with just straightening them but.............just as John will be bringing his mirror to check my tank undercarriage, I'll be bringing my alignment gauge to check out your tie downs

PS...There are a couple of other things that need to be changed on one of the plates but these have been talked about elsewhere!

Stay safe everyone

Great stuff Richard. I’m at the Tank Museum soon, so I’ll take a couple of pics. I’ve sent you an email and PM re Beier. All the best. Stephen