Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: AEC Armoured Car, MkII, Pt 1

the associated equipment company was a British company founded about 1912 made quite a name for itself in the realm of building buses and trucks one of the more successful trucks that it made was the 4x4 Matador which entered British Army service mainly as an artillery tractor however in 1941 one of their designers had this brilliant idea of using the Matador chassis as the basis of what would effectively become a wheeled tank you see the Germans were wandering around in the deserts of North Africa with fairly heftily armed armored cars so the British thought it might be a good idea to have something to counter it and so as a private Venture aec built the mark one armored car it was basically going to be a wheel tank it's in fact the turret that they put on the thing was lifted straight off of Valentine they built somewhere around 120 of the things I remember he is alluding me at this moment it it it's a thing that happens when you get more gray hair and yeah I know it it's going to happen to you don't laugh if it hasn't already happened uh but anyway eventually they moved on to the aec mark 2 now for the mark 2 they replaced the Valentine turret with a custombuilt one with a six pounder gun they presented these A's to British Army British Army says fantastic we'll buy them they didn't actually end up using them all that much though uh we we'll come back to the history towards the end but what you're basically looking at is as close to a British tank in capability because remember at the time we're still talking Cruisers like Crusader at best except on Wheels and it's got a a diesel engine so might actually be more reliable than the British tanks like Crusader so there there might be something to this anyway that's the back story so as we look at the vehicle itself I mean firstly I I'll just observe this is not ballistic this is simply a bit of shielding to stop knocks and bumps especially for the suspension components underneath so you don't run the ground the armor values are interesting you go on the web and you what are the armor values of the AC mark one two or three and you get figures like 2 and 1/2 in sloped this ain't 2 and 1/2 in SL we took a measuring tape to it because we were pretty sure this wasn't 2 and 1/2 in slope the thickest armor plate seems to be this lower front hole here slightly angled and it comes out as about an inch and a quarter armor plates on the side you're looking at an inch again angled slightly outwards uh it's less than an inch maybe on the upper hole and the figures that you see online they're not right so I just wanted to get that out of the way another thing you'll see is that it's a combination of bolted and uh correction riveted no it was right the first time bolted and welded normally if you have something bolted it's because you want to be able to remove components otherwise you go riveting no for some reason they just want bolts I don't know maybe AC like bolts but why did they bolt and weld it I don't know little splash guard here for the bullets to stop it ricocheting up there is a windshield very convenient uh because this thing will go along at a reasonable click uh reasonable clip forgive me no officially it says like 60 kilm an hour in actuality it according to the drivers here it'll go a little bit faster and then well that's it you you get to your standard vehicle equipment you got Wing mirrors actually do work uh low VZ headlight couple of uh Towing mounts and well that's pretty much a gist of it looking at the vehicle from the side it sort of demonstrates the I know we call it the brutalist approach to vehicle design it's not the most elegant looking vehicle at all but that wasn't really what they had in mind when they designed it so obviously it is a little bit higher than your typical vehicle you got four very large Wheels one on each Corner as you might expect perhaps but there are some advantages so firstly you'll see that the side of the hole expands outwards to the widest point at the turret ring before narrowing back that this was simply to allow for a larger turret remember the very original of these things were with a Valentine's turret and now we have something looks a little bit more Crown wellish I guess perhaps it's not but this what kind of gives you the impression of the style of the time uh you can also see that it's a combination of welded and bolted quick ask around nobody's entirely giving me answer as to why this is the case escape hatch on the side now again this this is literally escaped the only noral way in and out of this vehicle is to climb up and get down in or if you're the driver you get in the front hatch obviously a little inconvenient or perhaps dangerous if you're knocked out in combat and you have to get out well you you drop this and punch out but as you can see it's not something you would ordinarily open from the outside uh but the other advantage of the angle of the armor coming out is that you do get a little bit greater armor Effectiveness because of you were basically sloping the angle just in the vertical instead of the horizontal aspect or would you say the horizontal instead of the vertical I guess it depends very much on your perspective large storage boxes anything in here worth opening some are easier to open than others okay just a tarp uh this one looks like you have to undo some bolts to actually open them then you get to the suspension underneath now you're looking at basic leaf spring suspension here but if you were to get down and have a look at the actual powertrain you're going to see that the uh prop shaft which goes forward has ex exposed splines and my thinking behind this is that as the wheels are moving around you're going to be altering the distance a little bit between the front axle and the transfer case so it's going to try to extend or contract a little bit so those splines should allow that little range of motion uh and it's I'm not sure if it's the the best answer to the solution but it does seem to work here the other thing to note is the steering system so the steering is applied to one wheel primarily so as you turn the wheel there's a shaft that comes out and it turns this tie rod forwards and backwards and so think it's a tie rod or we call it a push rod or a pull rod I don't care what you call it I'm not a mechanical engineer comes through a pivot point at the front which then applies another Force to A rod on the inside slightly to the to the front of this wheel which will then turn this wheel there is a another tie rod or cross Rod or whatever the heck you want to call it which goes from this wheel to the other wheel so as this wheel is pushed it then pulls or pulls the other wheel along with it now that part of it is actually not en unique to this vehicle you'll see that in a few other things uh but uh outside of that you can see a little bit of protective covering for the universal joint in the middle there and yeah that's pretty much the whole side the turn well you can see the pistol Port we'll probably come back to that in a little bit very vertical front facing the again the armor values on this thing the the figures that you find online they don't seem to match at one what's physically in front of me so I put the ruler up against this thing it comes out at about an inch and a half at best little bit of storage at the back and then you get to the engine pausing briefly at the wheels and you see that some of the nuts are a little bit colorful why perhaps you may ask are some of them red and some of them not well it's because some of them are reverse thread righty TIY Lefty locy does not necessarily apply especially in 1940s vehicles and particularly especially in 1940s British Vehicles so ordinarily you would find a lot of vehicles the wheelnuts on one side thread in the traditional Direction and the wheel nuts on the other side thread in the other direction the theory being that as the wheels go round and round the wheels on the armed car go around doesn't really work does it and uh they would either tighten or loosen if because the thread designs hav't really advance of that point of course later on now you don't care it's the threads are always the same direction but in World War II uh that wasn't necessarily the case so to identify which one was a reverse thread You' painted now what I find interesting on this is that you have some reverse thread and some normal thread on the same wheel and if you look at the wheels on the other side they aren't changed around so you have the same outer ring or red on the left hand side as on this right hand side wheel whilst the inner ring of bolts is normal threaded on both sides I haven't figured out quite why that should be the case I am sure someone in the audience is a little bit more automotiv inclined and can tell me exactly why they've done this but I thought it was still at least interesting enough to note at the back there's a couple of interesting features to note firstly you're going to see the beams which seem to be the main support structure or frame of the vehicle think ordinarily the frame of a truck or whatever would be underneath and everything gets bolted on top not really the case here if you get down underneath and look up you're going to see the the engine open to all there's no obvious supporting beams there are a couple of cross beams that bolt into the side beams and they will also you'll see the beams at the front as well so yeah no monoco here this is very very brutish other thing you'll see the brakes for the wheels these are air brakes so as the vehicle is driving along every 10 or 15 seconds you're going to hear the pressure release of the air hissing out and that's actually a good sign because if you're driving along for more than 30 seconds or a minute you don't hear the of the air brakes you know you have no brakes so you have a little bit of advanced warning to start figuring out where you're going to crash again big leaf springs uh the engine underneath is the aec 195 now the earlier uh aec armored cars to Mark 1's came out with the 190 this is 195 it's 158 horsepower it is a diesel it is also a uh a motor found in buses if I recall correctly radiator at the back engine obviously under the two hatches that we're we're not going to turn the turret to open the hatches but that's how you would do it uh couple of lights and you know I don't see a towing Pendle this Hardward car can't tow anything that's it the left side of the vehicle is just as ugly as the right side of the vehicle I I'm sure that some mother would love this that's not for me I do know if the little lifting eye up there should you wish to pull the turret but other than that and the fire extinguisher on the fender there I think we'll call it quits on the outside so in that case I will come back to you in a week or two and we'll take a tour of the inside I'll talk to you then this is not an ugly armored car so you're the mother that likes it okay I I should say he was the lead restorer for this vehicle he might be biased

Channel: The Chieftain

Views: 91,836

Keywords: AEC Armored car, Belgian armored car, Belgian Armoured Car, WW2 Armored Car, British armored cars of WW2

Id: YF4vkZTo3eE

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024