Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch. M151 Series

the task to come up with a proper replacement for the iconic World War 2 Jeep was given the Ford Motor Company in 1951 Ford had quite a bit of experience building these things gpw was basically a jeep stamped out by Ford in ridiculous numbers the program would be the military utility tactical truck and therefore because of the habit of making acronyms out of things the vehicle will be known as the Ford month not to be confused with General Dynamics Land Systems current offering of the multi utility tactical transport which is basically serious I can tell an 8 by 8 version of the mechanical mule anyway regardless we are still at Rock Island and they have a number of these vehicles which are going on the auction block and a couple of weeks in May although the world war 2 Jeep in the post-war descent at the m38 were considered to be go anywhere do anything vehicles that was considered to be some room for improvement as a result the number of different design philosophies were tried the final winner was going to be a unibody design so gone is the chassis frame and it has independent suspension instead of a straight axle is found on the earlier two vehicles it still retained the title quarter Tom truck but the highway capacity was actually 1200 pounds and the off-road capacity 800 the designation ended up being the m15 one and the first thing that you're gonna look at the figure that are you looking at a Ford mock or are you looking at a Jeep is the grille at the front and of course the stamped metal bars on the Jeep are pretty much iconic to the vehicle but they were originally developed by Ford if you look at the bantams in the Willis first of all they had bars not this stamped metal so when they wanted to come up with the the grille design for the m151 well by keeping the stamped metal they figured this is a reminder to everybody that Ford came up with this design and by rotating at 90 degrees they differentiated it from the Jeep and the toquilla basically being associated with that manufacturer this vehicle is actually one of the prototypes it is an ex m151 fairly rare and it does have a couple of fairly unique features this is the only pre a2 that they have available right now so this is also gonna be we're going to demonstrate a couple of the a1 features as well so for example when you first giveaway that you're looking at an earlier version is that the marker lights are actually part of the grille itself later to be moved outwards other features on the early vehicle the brush guards would eventually become dispensed with and the blackout light on the left side would be replaced on the a1 by indicators on the sides then of course you get to open up the hood simple Jeep type latches and you get to see underneath the motive power which is either by Ford or Continental but if you look at the actual builders plate on me on the side of the engine all it says is model m151 it's a four cylinder in-line what's that about 71 horsepower at 4,000 rpm water-cooled you got nine quarts of coolant up front and general capacity for quarts and this engine actually looks to be in pretty good condition indeed if you were to pull out the dipstick you see some extremely clean oil however one thing the S engine is missing is the air filter system which would be a big black thing comes out here goes into the car about I guess I'll open up the hood of another a2 and I'll show you that instead while I'm here I will also point out the air conditioning system such as it is open up these hatches as hard drives forward shoves air down into the crew compartment well simple suspension as you can see is fully independent with coil springs so vastly different from the earlier jeeps within the coils you can find a double-acting shock absorbers the wheels themselves are on 16 inch rims the front tires are inflated the 20 psi the back 225 are they in deflate him 224 off-road work you could find jeeps that had correction mutts that had higher psi so the MA 25 ability the recoilless rifle version had 40 psi was a designated Road pressure originally the wheels were made of magnesium nice and light and probably expensive and also tended to burn well so after a short period they were replaced by steel wheels such as this one's with lightining holes it cut into them moving along the side of the vehicle you'll notice Li that this has come equipped with the hard cover top the hard cover is detachable it was available for any of the m151 series although perhaps not all that commonly found going past the ordnance bomb to show just who's testing it fuel tank filler is on the right side on this prototype but you'll see on the service vehicles that actually gets moved to the left behind the door which you'll see has the sliding system for regulating the door glass now under the passenger seat is where you would look for the batteries although the seats probably have better days the data plate is positioned on this vehicle on the prototype on the front right of the dash the first place you would ordinarily look for a data plate is the front of the right rear wheel fender the other place you might look is on the driver's side - come around at the back of the vehicle no great surprises the spare wheel is mounted in the traditional Jeep like location same with the jerrycan towing pendel with the receptacle for the electrics for the trailer nice solid window for looking at and keeping heat inside and of course your final distinguishing mark of her very early m151 are your stoplights again the a1 you start putting indicator systems into the vehicle not so here step up over the arch not that bad no power steering again so a huge steering wheel and interesting your note here is that to start it once you have the ignition to on which is this of course big never here on this particular very into the vehicle the starter pedal is actually underneath the clutch pedals so you push down the clutch to change gear as if you're gonna change gear you actually push beyond the the starter pedal is basically the stop for the clutch so a little extra force and your starter is engaged I can only imagine that it was moved in the subsequent vehicles because people kept trying to engage the starter when they're changing gears otherwise the other two pedals are fairly normal now you'll see that these are solid metal pedals and they change these in the later vehicles the dash is actually very simple your traditional light switch which hasn't changed since the year dot all of three dials oral pressure your speed and your temperature not even rev counter you're on your own for the revs front axle engage disengage a handbrake and your gearshift never there would be the system for the windshield wipers windshield will hinge forward it is a vacuum system on these earlier windshield wipers other than that this is a simple one around you're looking at basically an engine a steering wheel two front seats a bench seat at the back which is actually a little bit narrower it's only good for two people because you got to leave room for the wheel arches and that's it the m15 one was accepted for service 1960 in production started but 1964 production had changed slightly to the m15 one a1 and had a couple of minor tweaks really ambition to the earlier mentioned light changes you have new generators for the new electrical requirements the steering is changed slightly so you've gone from a seventeen point nine foot turning radius to about eighteen and a half most importantly though is that the suspension got beefed up the the official rated capacities were the same it just meant that you were less likely to break down not the most elegant vehicle exit but it works there's still room for improvement however certainly the vehicle was capable of doing pretty much anything that was asked of it the m151 a1d was quite possibly the most lethal 4x4 ever made for two reasons firstly it had nuclear weapons secondly like all the other m15 ones that had very nasty habit of rolling over in killing the occupants case in point 1967 over 3500 accidents were recorded with m15 ones thirty-six percent of them were single vehicle rollovers these accidents were faithful every week you were losing to soldiers dead and 37 injured this thing was proving more dangerous than the Russians and even by the cavalier attitudes at the time this was not deemed acceptable so solutions were saw one option was the rollover protection system which is basically just a roll bar one solution was not to enforce helmet wear they looked elsewhere they concluded that there were two additional major mechanical problems the first of which was a non directional tread tire this is designed to be as grippy as possible off-road and you can see why but it's also pretty useless on the road now what the m151 is basically it was designed to be an off-road vehicle the operators of the vehicle treated it though because hey look it's got a steering wheel four wheels gearshift it's a car and that's how they drove it doesn't work that way it is not an on-road vehicle so there was a driver training program that was instituted to stop the rollovers the other problem though was far more mechanical and that was related to the rear suspension the swing axles were basically just a sharp nudge away from oversteer overcorrection and then over the top the solution is implemented was a semi trailing axle the point of support shall we say was a little bit further forward wasn't the only change i've already mentioned that the marker lights move out because we now have indicator mounts on the side there are changes under the hood as well the big one is that the fuel pump has been changed from electrical to mechanical you'll also see that there are no longer any vacuum tubes going up to the windshield wipers they have been replaced by an electric motor system and of course you can see that air filter I mentioned earlier come around the side pass the reasonably sized wing mirrors the fuel filler port as mentioned has been moved to the left hand side data plate and this one is front and left is your traditional light control again since the year dodge added feature is an indicator lever so you may indicate if you choose to do so and again this this lever hasn't changed you'll see it in the Humvees slightly smaller steering wheel with the horn front and center to adjust your seating position it is these very simple mechanism of you lift it out of one notch you push it back into the next notch you'll also see that the pedals have become sort of hollow and peeled because after all you've just got into your Jeep and your feet are coated with mud and they're slippy and they need all the grip that they can get so the mud kind of squishes out through the pedal and the teeth grip your boot it's actually fairly clever idea although I have to say I'm a little bit surprised by the accelerator pedal which is not grippy at all and it's just basically a u-shape little wing mirror up top again the windows will hinge and well that's basically your a to being the rather capable little vehicle than it was as perhaps no surprise that a large number of variants were built for example there is an ambulance version which had a longer body on the same wheelbase chassis anti-tank versions recoilless rifle I mentioned earlier there's a tow missile launcher variant there was a variant that carried tow missiles for the tow missile launcher there is even a fast attack vehicle variant although designed by Ford a large number were actually made by AM general and even willis kaiser-jeep built a few with over a hundred thousand made at a price at the time for about two and a half thousand dollars it's perhaps no surprise that a large number of these and one five ones are now available for sale however the DoD had declared that this vehicle was too unsafe for civilian use so when they decommissioned them they chopped the bodies in half and then they chopped them in quarters however being the enterprising folks that they are the people in the vehicle restoration community simply welded the bodies back together again hey now that said any much enthusiasm their vehicle routinely knows about the propensity for rollovers so they tend to be rather careful about them on the rare occasions that they're driving anything like highway speeds there is one little caveat I'm gonna mention here you may have noticed as I'm standing here talking that this vehicle isn't like the other m151 a twos because you got leaf springs and a solid axle this is the rather rare m151 a 2l C and this was an attempt of solving the rollover issues by basically using a CJ Jeep axle and the new transmission and clutch to go with it obviously never entered service in fact as far as I know this is the only one that still exists anyway hope you found it interesting informative as he on that next one so eventually they were replaced by presumably also cheaper steel wheels such as this one with lightning holes cut into them okay so let's try this again this time with the record button pressed not to be confused with General Dynamics Land Systems current offering of a mod which is the multi utility tactical transport the program was called the mote military utility not to be confused by General Dynamics Land Systems current offering of a mud the multi utility tactical transport which is basically an 8 by 8 version of the mechanical mule yay now you

Channel: The Chieftain

Views: 141,705

Keywords: Ford Mutt

Id: G-PpDTRlCKk

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019