Chieftain Chats Abrams

i think this is the first museum that i've been to that has an a1 i've seen a couple of ips with the 105 but the 120 is kind of hard to come by let alone one it can actually climb into of course you can ordinarily climb into it but since i i guess they like me here or something they're letting me clamber over the m1 and i i tell you it's nice to see it again it's a shame i don't get to run around and roll over things because there really is nothing like the feeling of running around in the chart of this the first problem i have is i can't tell you about track tension because it's behind this number one skirt and you need a socket wrench oh hang on now it's jammed in place um with suitable application of percussive maintenance you can loosen this up swing open then a moon skirt and then you can get it the track tension but we can come back to this the chances are i'm going to come back and do a full inside the hatch on this and probably going to be a four-parter um especially if we can find some fuel and turbine oil uh they're actually they might not have drained the turbo shaft but it's definitely lacking a few fluids because when they parked it they don't expect it to run again unfortunately boo yes anyway so the m1 1970s technology that has been updated to the limit of what congress will pay for it and it's still a very good tank i mean is it the best in the world no probably not but is it perfectly serviceable and viable yes it is so you can't complain of course we've got the ammunition it's what really makes a difference these days because once you get above a certain level it's all down to the ammunition and the crew because with modern fire control systems if you can see it you can hit it the giveaway this is a marine corps tank well there's two of them one is the smoke grenade launchers are different to the american army type which are basically the british ones and there's also a mounting point for a jammer on top of where the the ci tv would go had they ever upgraded it so if you look at it it's like the m1 was designed with the ci tv never got installed if you got to the a2 and it usually ended up being used simply as a place to mount your spare road wheels anyway turbine engine lots of fun to drive but uh where you're probably more interested in is the inside so let's have a quick look of course getting in is a lot easier without the overhead cover the iron beams at least you can do it on this tank the m60 you can't get into tc's hatch at all there will be a caliber 50 mounted here dummy presumably and well let's see what i can show you now of course i will be doing a full inside the hatch where i'm going to show you things that you probably didn't know at the m1 for example this little device here it is used as an alternate place to place your controller so if you're outside and you want to scan around you pull the palm switch and there is a thumb switch at the back i'll show you another shot where you can use the electric traverse to traverse the caliper 50. now you can't really aim you've got the the very basic side i guess especially if you duck down under like this where i can now see by use of this very simple system more or less where the caliber 50 is aiming i still need to use my left hand inside the turret though to control elevation this is a very neat little feature so i am currently what is known as name tag defilate and that basically means that if your name tag is here it's about the level of your exposure if you go down one more level i'm fortunate enough since i'm tall i can sit on the top of the backrest at eyeball defilade which is this and you can see that i can go right through this vision block to my front so i can see the site now the vision block you'll also see is a couple of components so not only can i see horizontally through here i also have a periscope down underneath that goes through the same vision block so it's clear front and back top and bottom to come up and look at the periscope here very simple now the other thing about eyeball defilade is it makes you a harder target i'm very glad i did this because as i'm driving along like this you know that scene in the movie pattern where uh george c scott is talking about the bullet going right to his nose i kept revisioning this so as i'm driving around the rack i'm imagining this ak round going right for my nose terrible thing to watch war movies before you go to a war sit down i will definitely looking around like this i did not hear ebola impact the bullet impacted the periscope here and i thought it was a damn good shot and had you been about two inches higher than two inches okay maybe two and a half inches higher to three inches higher i wouldn't be here to be talking to you now so fortunately he missed the hatch is sizable so let me see if i can ah yes it's uh it's in manual mode right now which is a very inconvenient and you you've got so many ways of losing your fingers when you do this but it can be done the hatch as you can see is not exactly small so i took my my body armor they gave me they instructed us so he's sticking the head out the hatch you've got to be wearing body armor front back and sides well this tank was not designed for it and so i i kept the frontal armor because i figured just in case but if they got past this i was probably doomed anyway and well let's not mention the side armor shall we not they gave us rather a lot of weapons so my rifle was usually stored here and you could also throw it inside but if you wanted it ready to go because this is not rapid it's not like the flex 50 on the a2 it's there are pluses and minus at the commander's weapon station so this is more accurate long range but it's not something you want to be using in the hurry so you yeah keep my rifle here it's the m4 carbine and of course you have the nine millimeter in a tanker holster but as we're drawing out the weapons uh okay sign for your nine mils okay sign sign sign sign for your rifle oh we all get one okay because usually it was just i think the driver and voter got rifles though to have a two or three so we all got rifles um two m4s and two m16s one had an m203 fantastic are we ready to go oh no no sign for this m249 this what so we ended up i mean would you put an m24 down we ended up bungeeing it kind of in between the tc and the loader just in case we needed it sign for your 240s okay 240 there 240 there sign for your shotgun what yeah yeah you're getting a shock what do i want with a shotgun [Music] they gave us a shotgun so the the loader took uh correction the gunner took custody of that and he unbolted the stock and turned into a kind of a two-handled short thing in order to fit inside the tank with them all right now we don't know sign for your bayonets really i mean look i've got a tank i've got a 120 caliber 50 2762s we've got four nine millimeters four five five six we've got a 40 millimeter grenade launcher we have a shot gun we have a small machine gun the 249. and if it comes down to the point that this is not working and i can't even run over them and we're down to bayonets i'm giving up and going home it is not our day we are not destined to survive so we went to war without our bayonets i did once consider taping a saber to the end of the gun tube but i realized that my saber costs like 400 and the first round that went down range will be the end of it so i decided that it's probably not the best move anyway um other little features while i'm up here um well you can actually see fairly closely i guess the the two sides in the doghouse the gunners primary sight housing uh one side is the daylight vision and the other one is infrared but uh yeah old times so here's the problem with my inside the hatch basis of comparison shall we say as i always get why do you complain about this tank of course it's uh small it's a tank it's not designed for tall people this was my office every day for a year more or less a little longer okay we had maintenance days and a couple of days off two weeks to leave in the middle of the of the year-long tour but i have no problem working here look i sit perfectly straight and i'm at absolutely perfect eye lift level for the periscopes i can reach the caliber 50 side i can reach the site extension no problem at all my legs do not interfere with the gunner if i put the safety bar up which is apparently not coming up for some reason it's frozen in place unfortunately this safety bar comes up and it extends up to here and it's designed to keep your arm in you keep your arm here with your firing the safety bar will make sure that your arm doesn't get cut off by the breach so even with that one hand on the control which also has the radio controller as well so you don't have to toggle your cvc helmet i don't interfere with the gunner at all he's not in my way i'm not in his way you go turn down close the hatches not a problem this is what i consider to be acceptable because i can live in it and well i when i started doing the inside the hatch this was my default standard and then they kind of well i hung around a lot with the pershing that was being restored more or less when they got getting interested in the museum scene and that also was a big nice tank but this is an example of how you design a vehicle that you don't have to design it to be uh for short people and now yes the army does have an official height limit i do officially exceed it and well there are ways around once if you know how to work the system you can do it um that's the story for another day uh so i am not the only six foot five tanker uh that's out there i know i know some others that are actually bulkier as well so not only my eyes are also wider but this is fine and the advantage also to being tall so of course let's say we had leaf well we didn't get replacements when people were on leave so we'd be running around in a three-man crew and the standard configuration for a three-man crew is driver commander and loader and what you do is you put the site to 10 power um and you set the index for the ammunition type that you're going to be using and that's how you roll using the commander's override on the right here however um because i'm tall i didn't need to do that so as you're driving around in the three-man crew if i wanted to go from high mag to low mag i'll just do that if i wanted to change the ammunition type from uh it's usually heat and saber on the two too far in so that way you don't have to stop at a certain section it's just go all the way right there's heat all the way left to sabo oh look i did that without leaving the tc seat um that sort of thing for the thermal imager again high mag low mag within easy reach of the commander at least if you've got arms this length now one of the the fun things you have with computer games and world of tanks is no exception and also we look at the modern ones like armored warfare and so on uh is with a few exceptions like steel beasts um if the tank carries 42 rounds you can fire all 42 rounds at the same speed which of course is not what really happens because there's a ready rack of 17 rounds you have another one here and then there's there's also whole storage a lot of people forget that they haven't said some whole storage which is great because the customs inspectors don't know about it you can hide all sorts of things in there i didn't say that either did i no inside voicemail let's use insider the closest i've ever come to losing my arm is playing with the tc's ready rack semi-ready sorry and this is not a power door the loader side is hydraulically powered the tc's one isn't so there's a way of leveraging the thing open and what you're supposed to do before you do any mucking around with that is you're supposed to trip circuit breaker 19 which disables the hydraulic door well my loader was doing something in the in the ammunition section and say hey sir can you come down give me a hand so i hop down stupid me i do not check to ensure that he has tripped circuit breaker 19. so i'm sitting in the standing in the loader side and i'm reaching around to help him manipulate some of the rounds and the other thing i didn't check was the knee switch which was in the down position i didn't lift it up to the stove next thing i know my knee accidentally hip trips the knee switch and this quarter ton block of steel that is the the ammunition compartment door starts hydraulically opening uh fortunately at half speed because it's faster when the engine is running and the immediate thought is crack get your arm out of the tc side so whatever way i was sitting but between the things that were in and out i could not remove my hand and it was stuck there i couldn't get it out and this door is still coming over to to chop my arm off and i've come at this point i've come to the conclusion that i've lost my arm and bless them there is a pressure sensor on the end of the door on the cliff so that if the door is closing and there's something obstructing it like a round or your hand with the exception of the last half inch or inch or so if something taps that pressure sensor it stops instantly bless the designers and they put a pressure sensor on the opening side as well so a quarter ton piece of metal impacts my arm a little bit of a scar results but that's it i got you know get out of the tank sit down have a break well am i going to get my loader bulleting but so as i say this would say tanks are designed to hurt people they don't care who has um i probably wasn't the best tanker in all history honestly i'd like to think i held my own i mean but anyway um other features of the tank that you probably don't know and this is the sort of thing i'm not going to cover in inside that because it's not relevant to the vehicle um ah i was looking for this and of course stupidly it's in the the 50 cal bin this is the breach operating handle so i wanted to check and see whether or not the breach works now i'm going to find out all right so loaders aside and the aft cap deflector it does come off it's a little really sweet here and once that's nicely out of the way you can take it reach operating handle and insert it in ah never mind that answers that question they've welded the bloody thing shut suffice to say it would ordinarily attach in here and you'd simply lever it up but yeah unfortunately i don't know why so they did that boo yes unfair now let's see the firing pin in here yes there is a firing pin but it's an electrical ignitions original percussion so it's not quite the same it does the same similar function it basically connects to the primer [Music] i never did a hell of a lot of loading outside obviously you do it in things cool radios are missing which is understandable a little safety guard out of the way so as we're looking around um obviously there's no radios here that would ordinarily be mounted firstly this is a fire detector by the way uh look at all the ammunition you've got for the coaxial from here down here this is a massive bins like 11 000 rounds or something stupid like that i never counted them and [ __ ] feeds over the top of the gun and into the coaxial on the right side um lights of course uh white or blue uh a long couple so you will you'll notice if you watch a video of the inside of an m1 it's going down range the gun does not reset to a loading position and uh as a result if it's if the stabilizer is on you've got to cover it get catering he's kind of timed around as you shove it in or worse if you're in a hole down position and the gun is basically aiming down at full depression to get the round in you got to kind of lift it up to the roof and then slide it down and forward well your solution if you have such an inconvenience uh location and i don't know why they didn't do a gun reset position like the like the germans or the british but whatever uh is this ellen couple tag so you hit the air and couple and it separates it uncouples the gun from the site it stops the gun from following the side and this basically allows it freezes the gun so you can get the ammunition in this also means that you can be very unthreatening so if there's somebody that you don't like fairly close to you but you don't want to point your gun at them you hit your own couple and the gunner is now looking at this protester whoever it is you're about to run over um okay maybe not a protester i mean let's say you're doing a vehicle checkpoint or something and you're looking at people up close with high magnification but you don't want to look like you're looking at them the turret will be aiming at you because the gunner's sight doesn't slew but the gun is not going to be pointing at unless something happens which creates just drop the heel and couple the gun will immediately drop down into place and then you can then continue your engagement as far as loading so you'll see uh talk about how good somebody's loader is ah sorry i couldn't tell if the thing was recording still so as far as loading you here talk about how good oh i had a loader that would load in three seconds flat or whatever as well yes and no if you had the 105 ammunition that was fine because you could lap load it so if there's a random intuit you can grab another round from the back and have it on your lap so as soon as the round is firing you immediately throw it in there's no waiting with the 120 that is not authorized it is unsafe because of course it's somewhat fragile and believe me you don't want to have propellant flying around all all around inside the tank if the if the casing breaks so you gotta hit the the knee switch opens up the uh open ups the ammo door and you can start you know once you have it in your hand then you have a door closes and you're not allowed to arm the gun which is this big lever here you're not allowed to arm it until the door is closed for the testing thank you that's when your clock stops it's a little bit stiff so what will happen is your the first round is fired door opens you grab the next round which is right you know right in the middle it's called the sweet spot and you flip it over as slam it in and you're just waiting for the door to close once the door closes lift up the arm lever up however once you've fired three or four rounds you start hunting so you're no longer in the sweet spot when you start looking for the ammunition that's up at the top left corner you gotta kind of hit the release switch and drop the rack down and then grab the round out things start slowing down and this is one of those auto load or manual loader differences so for the first couple of rounds yeah manual loader is faster the problem is and it's not a guy getting tired the problem is just the rounds are inconveniently located and then of course once if it's suspended all 17 rounds then you got to go over to the other side or 18 rounds i think in some of the later versions go to the other side and start shuttling between and of course you can't have both doors opened at the same time it doesn't work that way so you got to put a couple of rounds on the floor shuffle over the door then put the rounds in and shut the door back and put the rounds back i'll guess very inconvenient once you fire but i mean if you're in an engagement we need to fire that many rounds it's a significant engagement so that's why if you're doing a an american gunnery test the usually an engagement is only three maybe four rounds so in between each each stage if you've got a good loader what he's going to be doing he's going to have his door open and he is going to start rearranging rounds in the ready rack so that the next round he grabs in the next engagement will always be the sweet spot so that's why you want to be careful when you say yeah i had a good loader that could throw around in three to four seconds he could yes but can he do 15 rounds in three to four seconds and not so much so i'm personally a fan of them out of the autoloader was one that was developed actually by megit and what it does is it sits in between the tc and the and the loader and it auto the entire bustle is automated and this thing slams the rounds in about four seconds and it doesn't require removing the loader so if you're one of those old-fashioned people that likes to have more people more hands available for maintenance or radio watch or or just an extra set of eyeballs look for threats it's actually a very nice compromise because that way your loader can be knocking around with the 240 and the gunners are slinging and slinging main gun rams downrange uh obviously never entered service i'm not entirely sure if it wasn't reliable enough or if the army just didn't think it was worthwhile it may be too expensive to refit but it can be done there's there's no requirement that if you're going to have another loader you've got to drop the fourth crew the question is is that fourth crewman worth the extra volume and weight of the tank but anyway i'm sure many other people will chime in in the comments section of course with their own war stories if you wanted to hook up your mp3 player uh you plug it in here uh sorry under under here you'd uh sacrifice a set of headphones you strip them down and you put them into the inputs here and uh i mean you do usually when you're bored uh so if you're waiting on the range to go down range or if you're uh yeah we're sitting on ops we had audiobooks going on the intercom system it's kind of like okay time to relocate after after half an hour in an op so we relocate to an opm hurry up driver i want to find out what happens to jane and you have a lot of fun thank you you do yes i miss him i do the guys obviously i miss the tank as well anyway um what else can i tell you okay we went back for a reunion after 10 years and i didn't recognize half of them i mean god you built up and you've got four kids yeah no i mean once you look at them for long enough you start to figure it out but still um okay i think i'm about done chatting away in here the one thing i'll notice is this tank does not have a boiling vessel it would ordinarily be down here under the loader seat but it was only in the ames tank this isn't the names tank this is an old one so sadly um no boiling vessel in this m1 boo yes let's see what else we can find one thing i'm going to observe while i'm in here very briefly is i'm taking this out of the way the data plate for the chart and according to this it is turret number 8136 combat weight of 23.1 tonne and manufactured august of 1987. now i seem to call the barely league was manufactured in 89. i saw that played off if i should remember it [Music] i was 14 when this time when my tank was made and i was 12 when this tank was made and obviously i'm old enough to my kids or could be if i had kids that are old enough which i don't but people my age could have kids and they were in them once and their parents were in room ones and their sons are in m1s or nowadays daughters since we've gone co-ed in the army and i mean you realize that every time i do the maths on that 1987 it comes out as over 30 years and it doesn't change every time i do that math so i mean the vehicle that i was in belongs in a museum very disconcerting well at least not a b-52 driver that was needed like five generations of people gotta help them so if you're on the back of the tank you'll see a niche feature that they've added and by this point they'd be building tanks for 60 something years so they probably figured out many of the fine details and that is the anti-slip coating that stops you from falling off in the rain although the surgeons will still yell at you for three points of contact at all times if you're lucky you had a top like this with simple blowout panels if you're unlucky you had the version that had three lifting points for the quick ammunition changeout system the theory behind this was instead of having to load 40 something around individually through the hatch you get a crane and you lift off the entire module of ammunition you lift out the empty rack and lift in the new rack and you'll be done in x many seconds flat never came to fruition of course never happened but the problem was that if you had these things you couldn't sleep up here because i mean this is a nice big flat area and you can i've seen people set up deck chairs on here while they're waiting for the turning gunnery or you do we call it the turret lizard where you just sunbathe so yeah you wanted to have a flat one the crosswind sensor now here's your helpful hint for the day if you're planning on joining the army you need to know this if you're planning on joining becoming a tanker at least the crosswood sensor does not need to be warmed before operation i'm telling you now that's your freebie if you don't know what i'm talking about um well just let's just say let's see if you can remember my advice uh let's see the engine so of course the m1 has a terrible reputation for sucking down fuel and it's partially deserved because it does suck down fuel at least when you're idling and there'll be several attempts at getting a auxiliary motor into the tank the original was mounted back onto the the whole rear on the right corner and a certain extended box it was this thing that was basically where the taillight is and then you see the taillight on the far side awful system uh very unpopular kept getting knocked off uh they didn't like it uh so for a while we had no auxiliary motor and what that meant was that if you're sitting on an op or something you were running the turbine and you were sucking down the fuel finally they got this one that fits in the bottle rack and you know you don't have to do that anymore so now the tank just sips fuel while you're in an op and when you're on the go the turbine is actually surprisingly efficient a lot of people think it's inefficient about at speed it's as good as you're going to get more or less [Music] the problem though with this one is it takes up a third of your real estate in the muscle rack so it was very unpopular a lot of tankers would simply dismantle the thing fuel be damned they weren't paying the fuel bill the solution was the bustle rack extension which attaches onto the back and adds like 130 real estate to your bustle rack so people don't mind having the auxiliary motor in there anymore you know that's uh that's about it for up here i think um see what else i can find so back at the front there's a couple of different ways of getting on these things by the way and the right rear corner is the official way because that's where the machine guns aren't and it's on the tc side having a conversation with somebody who's next to you by the way if you're the tc and somebody flags you down take off the helmet and you're yelling at each other on the left side you're going to have a grab handle and a wire as a steel wire and very useful for getting up there is a similar steel wire on the far side but i do not know why they didn't put another grab handle perhaps they just simply wished to disincline people from climbing up on the front right side because that is well where the coaxial machine gun is so a lot of people forget there are fuel tanks the front so they're to the either side of the driver they perform a couple of functions one is more fuel another is they function as additional armor so if the tanks are filled you get a little bit more protection and again this is the whole you shouldn't have fuel inside the tank well yes and no it depends on how you design the surrounding area the fuel tanks are a little bit annoying to fill up so what you have to do is you have to spin the turret so that the little notch under the gun is on top of the hatch and that gives you the room to lift up the hatch and then you can put your hose pipe in and you got to do it again for the far side so there are three fuel tanks you got the front left front light and the big one in the rear and the big one is the one that you use as much as you can you only move to the front if you if you're starting to run a bit drive now the vehicle as you can see the fenders are a little bit beat up and the reason for that is the reason it's in the museum this vehicle was hit not once but twice by roadside bombs ieds in modern parlance and in one of them the crew commander the tc was killed unfortunately uh the rest of the crew have been tracked down they know where they all are so the crew have actually come back out with the widow of the tc and they've reacquainted themselves with the old tank and the gunner put his logo on the front of the tank again now this is a bit of a barge this is the original hull but because they had a heavy common with the depleted uranium armor what they did before they gave this tank to the museum is actually replaced the turret they gave it a different turret that was a little bit older and your giveaway is if you look at the four numbers on the side of the turret if it begins with a u it's got depleted uranium if it begins with a an m it's got the aims upgrade at least if it's an a1 i don't know what the a2 is i was never an a2 tanker so that's the story behind this the crew as i say they've all come out they've reacquainted themselves with the tank and you know they're they're not uncommon visitors these days so that is the unfortunate story as to why this is now in a museum just got hit too many times i don't really have a heck of a lot else to say it's uh it's a nice little run-down memory they end up yammering at you long enough uh but as i say now that i know this tank is here now that i know how complete it is inside all i have to do is find the time to write a script come back out i need to buy more lights what i did at rock island was was a definite learning experience need new equipment and we'll see how i end up so anyway hope you found my rambling interesting and informative i'll see you next time

Channel: The Chieftain

Views: 661,278

Keywords: inside the chieftain's hatch abrams, M1 tank, abrams tour

Id: aladW_D4nKU

Length: 34min 42sec (2082 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 14 2018