Inside the Chieftain's Hatch: M16 MGMC

yes I am back at the Rock Island auction company I learned a couple of lessons the last time I was here so I picked up some new equipment and I've actually had time to read the operator's manual for some of the equipment that I already had which I unfortunately did not have timing before I came out here last time however I'm going to quickly address a question that often comes up in the comments because I'll aim from forgotten weapons tends to come here and we tend to release our videos from here at about the same time have I done a collab with him no I never met the man and although I'm sure we'll eventually he's already been out here he's done his thing he's filmed and if you want to learn about these pop guns go over to his channel nobody does it better personally I'm off looking for something a little bit bigger oh this is a little bit bigger it's impressive and although believe it or not I do have a pilot's license it's not for one of these not for anything even like one of these and tempting though it is I'm probably not going to be able to do this one justice so let's find something else this however is it a bit more my scene regulars to my channel will know this is one of my favorite vehicles now I'm gonna leave the story the m2 and m3 half-track cars for another day probably when I'm actually looking at a plain old m2 or m3 half-track car in the meantime I'm gonna pick up the story in October of 1940 so the Americans are paying some attention as to the goings on in Europe and they like everybody else are seeing the German newsreels showing the Panzer forces in the Luftwaffe sweeping across Poland and France laying waste to all before them and of course especially France once the word of what was going on for the Panzer divisions hit America this gave a little bit of impetus to well can we come up with equipment that will stop the Panzers and that sets us off to the anti-tank side of the story and also can we come up with equipment that will prevent the German Air Force from playing such a decisive role it is perhaps interesting to speculate how the u.s. army would have entered the war had the Germans actually been emphasizing in their propaganda newsreels the horse-drawn army that actually made a majority of their forces maybe the Americans wouldn't have just thrown everything oh maybe they did who knows wouldn't have made a difference perhaps so anyway we are now going to have a look at this m16 multiple gun motor carriage which is going up for sale on the auction block in a couple of weeks so anyway October of 1940 a program is started contract has given the Bendix Aviation to come up with a twin caliber 50 mount and they did theirs trials and a couple of lessons were learned if the first lesson was that the mount needed to be something a little bit more stable than a 1 ton 4x4 truck the second lesson was that Bendix aviation didn't make a very good caliber 50 mm so back to the manufacturer it went for more investigation in trials and fixes and whatever else you do when your system doesn't work as advertised this took a while in fact it took so long that in the meantime WL Maxim comes up with his own design for a twin caliber 50 mount and submits it for the Army's consideration this would be known as the M 33 and it was a self-contained unit it had anything from the operator to the batteries all in one shows a module and it just blew the competition right out of the water it was tested on an m2 half-track in April of 42 and by September of 42 had been standardized that's a multiple gun motor carriage m13 you put the same twin mount in the back of an m5 half track and now you have a mg MCM 14 of course I should point out that the M 13 by now be moved to an m3 it was a little bit bigger now whilst 1 M 2 tends to garner respect and 2 is definitely an attention getter this was apparently insufficient deca for of all organizations the Coast artillery they would like a quad 50 mount if the ordinance would be so cunningness to provide them with one and ordnance branch being the helpful that they were said about doing so now initial attempts such as the t37 MGMT were less than successful but again Maxon shows up with a solution what the basically did was it took the m33 twin man to put two more caliber 50s on it we designated the m45 and hey presto you got yourself a quad 50 huzzah well it's actually a little bit more to it than that but it's the general gist the type very quickly gained approval it was standardized in December of 42 although it was May of 43 before the production lines opened up and the MGM cm16 started rolling off the line if you put the same quad mount in the back of the m5 the International Harvester half track well you end up with the m17 now one of the things I love about the u.s. half track series is that there are such beautifully simple vehicles if you imagine this is basically a 4x4 truck except that the rear wheel has been elongated into a track shape you really won't be far off you can also see the family resemblance with the m3 Scout car that I'd filmed earlier just imagine it a little bit longer the body is of quarter inch steel all over with the exception of the windshield plate they're held in place by overhead screws self-locking nuts on the backside makes a replacement and repair very easy if you move forward a little bit well you come to the characteristic fenders made of pressed steel the harvester versions one of your giveaways is a much more angular flat shape come a little bit further forward again and you come up to the winch the half axe of course will come either with an anti ditching roller or a winch then according to the manual which is if curious TM 97 10 all of the m16s came with a winch headlights could be dismountable the later versions were and under the fender are your 20 by 7 wheels they're mounted on leaf springs with dual action shock absorbers of course the front axel is driven tires come to 55 psi and our course on those lethal split rims otherwise at the front very simple bumper coupler tow hooks your louvers for the radiator cooling and then you get to the hood so the hood itself again it's the accordion type we've seen it before two spring-loaded latches and we can see the white 160 ax 386 cubic inches inline 6-cylinder water-cooled hundred and forty seven horsepower components are again easy to figure out because this is a simple mechanical engine big generator starter motor you got a electric fuel pump in this one and not a mechanical one your spark plugs are really obvious the carburetor well that's on the first side cut inset and image radiator cooling system which comes down obviously to the fan the fan is driven by the belts there really isn't much to the system it's very part of the reason this thing's so popular with collectors you can keep it going you can just make out the steering shaft the steering is done by a cam and lever design the camps are actually tapered a little bit so depending on how far you crank the wheel you get more and more turn it's it's basically a ratio depending on the necessity of your turn again not what should be said about this other than it's wonderfully simple moving further back we have the droppable windshield armor it's on three supports of course do take out the glass before you try to drop the armor otherwise you will not be very happy there are also removable windshield wipers continue our tour back wing mirror and jerrican are obvious as is the pioneer tools and then we start coming to the main body you'll note that it's hinged to a lab room for the caliber 50 mounts to properly rotate so the two sides and the back will hinge down and then of course you get to the track system so we come to the fun bit the tracks at the back and of course this is quite simply remove the wheel and you insert the drive sprocket the main part of the suspension is the bogie it's a vertical volley suspension system each bogie has two sub bodies forward and aft each sub bogie has four roadwheels rubber tyred of course there is a central return roller at at the top and the compensating idler is at the back end which as you can see is also on a coil spring for some more suspension but it is also a just attention up at the front is the drive sprocket and yes you can see it does have teeth the teeth mesh with the metal that is inside the rubber track know the track itself of course is what gives you the extra traction to make this a more capable vehicle offroad then let's say the scout car now if the track isn't sufficient it is actually possible to get chains just there just like snow chains on the car except they're much much longer and you strap them to the track now the other thing about the track is that as it's continuous you can't break track in order to change it so what you have to do is you get a crane and you get a big chain and you lift up the bogie you basically take the weight of the vehicle compress the bogie Springs without compressing the track loosen the tension on the back end and there should be enough sag in the track now that with a couple of pry bars or planks of wood or whatever you have handy you can lever the track off and replace it with a new one finding spare track for these things is a little bit tricky there was until recently a good source in Israel because the Israelis used these half-tracks for quite a period of time and while they had a good supply of spare track well that has apparently since run dry and now folks are having a source to track from other places now if you get underneath it again this is so simple a vehicle that if you understand a trucker you can understand the star track so we take the power take-off comes from the transfer case down through past this is your hand brake disc or your parking brake and it is quite literally just a disc brake power continues through universal joint into the differential from the differential goes as you would expect the drive wheels and so we come to the back and you'll see that there is no door on the back of the m-16 now there is one on the back of the m16a1 for reasons I'll come back to in a moment another thing to look for is see if you have hard corners or round corners on the back of the compartment if you have hard corners like this solid 90-degree angles you have yourself an m16 manufactured by white or diamond T if you have a rounded corner you have yourself an M 17 manufactured by International Harvester and these are almost exclusively donated to lend-lease and well in practice that meant the Soviet Union further than you have your pintle and a receptacle for the trailer braking system electric brakes symbol taillights and marker lights and a luxury item canvas mud flaps we're gonna finish our tour of the outside of the vehicle government up the right side past the exhaust pipe up to the battery box which stays in the same location as it was in the Scout car and also the doors are exactly the same as they were in the Scout car complete with the flip-down armor shielding look inside you have the same louver control for the radiator at the front the armored shielding all the way forward is all the way closed and then you have the four individual stages you can select from to get all the way back to the full open position one of the annoyances with this vehicle is on the floor board where you would like to very much to put your foot the same floor board it's probably a running board the little thing in two step on the outside there's a shovel what we'd want to put your foot which is in the rotating same general layout as you saw before in the m3 we're complete with the wonderful sort of Art Deco etched - that I very much appreciate very large steering wheel has a significant disadvantage if you're my height because it really gets in the way if your leg I have tried to get to the far side from here and I just can't do it I have to open a side door reason that is such a large steering wheel is that there is no power steering you are down to simply using the leverage of your arms and if you have a large steering wheel makes it easier nothing particularly unusual about the layout of the vehicle you start off with your rpm gauge on the left has a little plate here that shows you what all the settings are for your knobs and levers there is a builder's plate on the right you can see the vacuum controllers for the windshields so as long as the engine is operating there is a vacuum coming in through the pipe when you turn on the windshield wipers the it opens up a valve on the far side and instead of being sucked in one place the wipe start swiping I guess from the bottom and when the wiper gets to a certain level it sort of hits a valve for lack of a better term it's it's like the entire hinge system is part of the valve then all of a sudden the vacuum is switched to the other side a bit like a piston and back goes the wiper again and US army vehicles kept this vacuum system of wipers for quite a length of time and obviously I'm not entirely sure I understand why because you would think this vacuum system will be at just a prime opportunity for a leak we not solely in the windshield as I say you've got to pull out the windshield locks before you lower the armor plate it'll be a little bit embarrassing otherwise I do have a wing mirror there is the rheostat here that I mentioned for towing a trailer with the electric brake so you set the weight of the trailer between you know heavy right now or all the way down to light and when you apply the brakes to the vehicle it'll transmit it to the the electric brakes on a trailer ignition switch this is not original it is however a very common aftermarket modification shall we say for the private collectors not least because you want to make sure that nobody wanders off with your half track I guess kind of how big a deal half track theft is but I guess choke and throttle this here is the horn a very simple horn but it works the original ignition will be here there used to be a push-button start so the old floor-mounted starter pedal is gone from this vehicle that we'd seen before and it would have been you turn on the ignition you push the ignition button which would have been here and that was how you would have started it speedometer obviously and a glove compartment again with a lock you do have to select which of the two fuel tanks you're going to use or select is down here behind the driver the two fuel tanks right-left 30 gallons each at three and a half gallons and a mile that will get you a grand total of about 200 miles it's 45 miles an hour is the maximum permissible top speed in high range in low range it is 18 miles an hour turning radius 30 feet 14 depth 32 inches headlight control again with the blackout lockout depending on how far out you polar lets you know what's that of the front and rear lights you have operating how bright they are and well that's basically if when you look down at the pedals your clutch or what you think is a clutch is actually a clutch the brake is the breakers it's a hydraulic system drum brakes everywhere and of course the accelerator pedal is the little pedal on the right lever is you got the power take-off for the winch a four-speed manual transmission first top let well sure just look at the look at the diagram here hand brake Ford is off back it is on then you have the two levers one for the transfer case range for low or high range low being forward and then one for the engage or disengage of the the front axle it is possible have it in six by six high but if you're going too low it must be in six by six low I say so I'm sorry this isn't a six by six truck it's a it's basically a four by four so front axle must be engaged in low other things so the seat that I'm on there's one right next to me here for a passenger right in the middle and I would assume that there's one on the right that seems to be missing from this particular vehicle now viewers will recall that I mentioned a tankfest that the m16 is the only vehicle on which I'd ever popped a wheelie and again if you missed that was because it was in first gear low range I didn't realize that the ratio was so low that you just let go the clutch and there will idle up the hill no I dropped the clutch you put on the accelerator and that was it but that gives you an impression of the level of traction that you can get to get yourself out of whatever it is that you got stuck in but if you really do get stuck that's what the winch at the front is for controlled by the power take-off from the right depending on where you place it is either to wined or unwind the winch the actual speed and start to stop it's controlled by a clutch and the accelerator it is possible thoughts to not only have your power take-off on but also be in low range first gear with the axle engaged so now you're pulling with the winch and the wheels and the tracks now if you are so badly stuck that you can't get out with the vehicle in low range first gear wheels engaged tracks engaged chains on the tracks chains on the wheels and the winch pulling you now you deserve a medal and B you're gonna be prohibited from ever driving again of course what makes the m16 so unique is the m45 quad 50 mount as far as I can tell these are dummies but I've no doubt that some owner of a 45 somewhere has the appropriate permits and has put four live caliber 50 on it sadly I cannot demonstrate the joy which would result the manual describes the thing as a self-contained semi armoured mount electrically driven that is capable of being mounted on a fixed toad or self-propelled mountain case of course obviously we are in the self-propelled here and in practice what it actually means is that there is two six volt batteries wired in series to give it a 12-volt power source to keep that charge is a single cylinder Briggs and Stratton engine and it doesn't keep the battery fully charged per se what what it does is it provides enough juice that if you have the amount five minutes on in five minutes off you can keep the whole system going for about five hours everything is basically bolted onto the back of the half-track this means that the entire amount is fully independent of the cars system so the car can be completely powered off the master power off the quad 50s on the back will still operate to the front of the mounts are the seats which are basically just padded cushions and God knows where you put your feet for the two assistant cannoneers you can doubtless guess that the best way this thing to operate is spun around the back so that the cannoneers have room to operate because right now as it is he can imagine that in the back if the if the machine guns were to spin if meant with the spin they would get crushed this was something that was solved a little bit later on in towards the end of the m45 s life as an aside I'm sitting on one of the two thirty gallon fuel tanks the semi armoured mount has little fold down flaps here for better vision I mean armor is a relative term remember the whole vehicle is only quarter inch armor and as you can see the the flaps here for the gunner aren't a whole hell of a lot better obviously we have four large bins each one carries 200 rounds of caliber 50 and that is the function of the two lads here obviously to keep control the guns are mounted by use of the simple cross bowls that you would ordinarily expect to find on an m2 the whole shebang comes in at about 2,400 pounds the electric motors will spin the turret around a full 360 in six seconds maximum elevation is 90 degrees maximum depression is 10 at least in theory there there are a couple of interlocks in the system to make sure that you don't run into bits and bobs like the the drivers head yeah I'm sure you'd be very annoyed now I'm not gonna really stand at the back because there's no room for the camera and me at the same time so enter cut shots of the location of the two batteries which are removed the single cylinder engine that I mentioned before together with the fuel tank just above it the Gunners seat is it's a very simple sort of sling thing he's got his controller he would have the reflector sight the reflector sight would be a mark 9 and not use of the mark designation that means that it was nicked from the Navy because it was army will be the M designator the US Navy actually nicked it from the British it's actually a bar and Stroud gj3 of course the job of the two extra cannoneers is reloading the large two hundred round bins which sounds like a lot but believe me when you have your finger on the trigger that 200 rounds goes surprisingly quick a total of about 5000 rounds of ammunition would be carried around the vehicle which is plenty enough to ruin anybody's day however it turned out that opportunities to shoot a German aircraft were somewhat limited due to the effectiveness of the Allied air forces which modern of that annoyed the anti-aircraft Gunners are not so absent anything up tissue that they simply pointed the gun sideways and they shot at ground targets and proved surprising the effect of the Germans that were on the receiving end apparently did not appreciate this another group of people that did not appreciate this for the Chinese in Korea because they did a lot of the human wave attacks of the time and you needed something that had a fairly high rate of fire to deal with them enter again the gun motor carriage is the anti-aircraft well where you just point the gun sideways and who's away in fact so much demand was there for the m16 half-track that they ended up taking regular m3 personnel carrier half-tracks and adding em 45s to those as well now they can be easily distinguished because there was at the ones that have the door at the back that I mentioned when they converted them from the personnel carrier that never got rid of the door and they also don't have the drop down side so being little bit careful as you depress in your cannons there was one additional attempt to take the concept and just turn the dial to 11 and that was an attempt to put the Elco be sick stir under the back of the half track so the b6 not only had four 20 millimeter cannon it also had two caliber fifties as a triggers this turret was originally designed for PT boats and it was just too much for the half-track to handle so sadly that was the end of that in total 3614 of these m16s were built an additional thousand m7 teens were built basically for the Soviet Union 600 of the m16s were actually conversions off of the earlier twin mount M 13s now once the value of the system he demonstrated again in Korea which I mentioned you convert the m3 armored personnel carrier to the m16 a1 April of 52 an order was placed for an additional 1622 conversions now in addition as I said to the rear door and the non dropping side panels other differences were a six inch riser for the mounts to make sure that you didn't hit the side paneling on the the vehicle body and also they installed much wider armored shields to protect against return fire so that's it as I said I really liked this vehicle and since I didn't end up with the an three Scout car maybe I should start a GoFundMe for this one anyway tune back in maybe mid to late May and I'll update in the text description at the bottom just how much this thing went for that was it we found it interesting informative I'll see on the next one to start her up there's really isn't much to it if it's cold which really it isn't right now you'd pull the choke out you could set the hand throttle to a certain level this one seems to be stuck but trust me you don't need it again this is a retrofit of thing so we'd set the ignition hold down the clutch make sure you're in neutral anyway and turn it over or not don't have the start of running anymore than ten seconds at a time otherwise you run the risk of burning it out so let the choke step slowly out better idle for a little bit and well once you're ready to go drop the handbrake and set off [Applause] they're looking at the propaganda reels coming out of Germany it was trialed on an m2 I in April of 1941 and well things worked out very nicely indeed because of reasons take three underneath the white 168 X inline six-cylinder 147 horsepower or is it 147 cubic inches Scott down 147 horsepower in 93 86 and steering this done by a bevel and I'm gonna look this one up again because I think it's not very well no it's a camel lever with an actual continuous track system everyone

Channel: The_Chieftain

Views: 362,414

Rating: 4.9453168 out of 5

Keywords: M16 Quad, multiple gun motor carriage, m16 halftrack

Id: oR8CYoPJEOE

Length: 30min 36sec (1836 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

So if anyone is wondering why @04:10 the coast artillery need more dakka, the cost artillery turned into air defense artillery in WW2.