Inside The Chieftain's Hatch: M50 Pt.1 - World of Tanks

the history of the israeli army is something of an armor enthusiast's dream they seem to use pretty much everything from everywhere to include captured equipment pressed into service their willingness to use whatever they can is probably best typified by the service careers of the m4 sherman which saw many upgrades over the course of their lives now this particular m50 is one with which i am well familiar from its time at the mvtf in california it can now be found under the care of the staff of battlefield vegas who have been nice enough to allow me to clamber over it for a little bit in the cool weather of early july in southern nevada [Music] [Music] this is gonna be a long intro because nothing about israeli sherman's is simple famously of course they started off with scrounging shermans and guns from wherever they could scrap yards reserve pools and so on in order to survive the war of independence but by 1951 they were in a position to take a slightly more standardized approach to things so a captain hillel moonen was sent to france to do some bulk shopping the french of course were well equipped with a wide variety of shermans which were procured during and after the war and they were more than willing to sell a batch of 75 millimeter tanks which by this point were somewhat beyond their use by date by western european standards the israelis weren't picky the french had their own sherman problem at the time as well they had a wide variety of sherman types from a wide variety of sources and they were something of a logistical nightmare they decided that they wanted to standardize everything on one engine type since they had more continentals than anything else they decided that all the other shermans that they had would be re-engined with the r975 so they opened them up took out whatever the old engine was modified the engine deck dropped the continental radial in and they redesignated these vehicles as a transformer which basically had a little t at the end of it so you had an m4a2t an m4a3t so it's an a2 or an a3 an american server since the engine is a difference in french service they all have a continental when these were shipped off to israel by this point they're all such a hodgepodge they defy conventional nomenclature the israelis simply called it the m3 after the millimeter gun m3 with which they were all armed pretty soon though it was obvious that some up gunning would be required so back to france they went again for more shopping france being one of the few countries willing to openly sell arms to israel at the time two purchases were made one was for a batch of 76 millimeter armed tanks these were known in israeli service as the m1 again it's the 76 millimeter gun m1 or it was the m1 super sherman if it had the horizontal volume suspension system the other purchase they made though was for a new tank entirely and this turned out to be the amx 13 with a 75 millimeter gun now the israelis very much liked the gun but they were a little bit ambivalent about the tank upon which it was to be found so a small order of amx 13s was placed and in the meantime they set about doing experiments to see could you fit this amx gun into the m3 sherman turret it turned out that yes you could and so a conversion program was started about 25 of these tanks were delivered to israel in time for the 1956 war in keeping with the trend again they were named after the gun which was mounted on the german in this case the m-50 the israelis weren't done yet though by the early 1960s continentals are starting to get a bit longer in the truth and troublesome so another upgrade program was started this time to the hulls the engines were replaced by a commons diesel if the tank still had the vertical value suspension it was replaced with horizontal valued new fuel tanks were installed new electrical systems so on the entire rebuild process basically stripped the hull all the way down to bare bones when israelis were starting to put these things back together though they weren't really all that pushed about putting the same pieces back onto the same tanks that they came off of in the first place it was just whatever was handy on the assembly line so you could end up maybe with a late production hull with a mid production turret with a three-piece differential housing and horizontal valued suspension there's really no such thing as a standard m50 and this vehicle is no exception so i'm going to get into some of the quirks as we go around it so that was the long introduction complete now it's time to look at the tank [Music] so what we have here is a small hatch sherman complete with additional armor plate in front of the bulges for the driver and bog because of course those bulges are nearly vertical and it's a little bit of a weak spot i do note how the mounting point for the canvas the dust shield does actually merge onto the new replacement plate the armor plate itself is the old 2 inches sloped at 58 and then we come down to the differential housing as you can see this is a late production differential housing the shark knows but the vehicle itself was originally built with a three-piece differential housing and i'll explain later how we know this another thing i will explain later is this zero one six which further complicates this vehicle's history other items so what we have here is a mounting point for the tow cable so what will normally happen is the toe cable would be stretched front to rear with one end mounted in here and the other end mounted aft these two attachment points here are being used in the traditional manner you'll see a lot of photographs of m50s with in fairness a bit more concertina wire than here but hey safety we're not in wartime and you simply drape the concertina wire up top and you clip it into place down here otherwise it's pretty much a standard sherman so your lights are behind the bush guards there was a replacement siren mounted here so not the world war ii siren there's a later one in a sort of a tunnel shroud has since been deleted your standard towing shackle mounts at the bottom of the differential housing also can be used for lifting said differential housing of course because you simply undo the bolts here and that's it it's pretty much a standard sherman and of course on the turrish front you're going to see the other really noticeable difference from the front which of course is the gun and mounting now remember this is an original small 75 millimeter turret and they're sticking a not unsizable gun into it so in order to avoid ending up with like firefly levels of crampedness what the israelis did was they added a protruding mantlet actually the friendship because it was developed in france the original vehicle that was used for the test project is still in some more although it has been converted back to the earlier configuration anyway back to the mantlet i do this sometimes i go off in tangents what looks like a an additional cast mounting isn't actually welded onto the turret front or anything like that it's bolted on in exactly the same manner as the original mantlet would have been you just can't see it behind the weather striping but the end result of it you can see the pivot point is nearly a foot in front of where it would be on a regular m3 sherman [Music] as we come around to the side of the tank this is how we can tell that it was originally built with a three-piece differential housing look at the gap between the road wheels between the bogeys on the hbss system this marks the hull as having been built as an m4a4 the extended version with the chrysler multi-bank engine all m4a4s were built with the three-piece housing this means then that this particular tank has started with the chrysler engine moved to the continental engine and now has the cummins engine as well as having had the suspension units replaced from vvss to hvss since the suspension is wider they added additional sand shields which are wider and that also provides opportunity for a little bit of stowage on the side so we got three jerry cans set of trap rocks sponson box here this is the exhaust for the auxiliary generator two road wheels at the back now if you look up you're going to see the french designed smoke dischargers or smoke grenade launchers and further back is the counterweight that was added to balance out the length of the gun on the front now all the m50s were made from different size uh different types of sherman turret so he had a high bustle turret or low brussel turret didn't matter the process was the same you cut off most of the buster you leave a little shelf at the bottom provides a little extra support and then you add the counterweight on top of that so this particular vehicle was a high muscle high muscle turret so as the first of the hvss shermans that we've come to now it's a good time to take a little look at the suspension the hvss bogeys are bolted onto the side just like the predecessors were which probably made the upgrade process a lot easier the primary difference of course between the suspension types is the volume springs these two things here are now mounted 90 degrees off from previously the horizontal instead of vertical which is not really surprising given the names horizontal and vertical valve suspension systems just above you got a shock absorber and the two pairs now of road wheels because we have wider track we now have four road wheels for bogie instead of the earlier two have a little bit more range of motion giving you that smoother ride for which the e8 suspension system was famous another obvious difference is the return rollers are now bolted directly to the hull sides instead of being mounted as part of the bogey where the return roller and skid would otherwise go you see instead here now is the shock absorber an interesting little feature just pointed out to me is on the bottom of the hull right in the corner where it meets the floor behind the inside wheels they have shaved out a little bit of the hull armor and the reason they did this was just make a little bit easier to change the inside road wheel when you need to so it gives you just a little bit more room as you're pulling it off of the hub the track is the late type of course 23 inches wide six inch pitch typical construction with end connectors wedge bolts occasional cooling tubes if you see a hole that's because it's a cooling tube there are 83 blocks per side now this is the long-haul version if with a shorter haul let's say it was originally based off of an m4a3 or an m4a1 you'd be looking at 79 blocks per side israeli shermans generally came with steel cleat tracks this is obviously a rubber chevron track and well this is a post-war thing usually for collectors and so on it just makes life a lot easier when you're driving on the roads and the department of transportation doesn't come after you the rear hull is something which would be interesting if it wasn't for the fact that a large exhaust deflector is located here now the real exhaust deflectors are hinged to allow you extra access to whatever you need to but they're a little bit hard to come by these days for restoration so this is a fixed one in place and requires lots of unbolting and i'm not going to ask the lads here to do this in the middle of july if you were to look behind and hopefully we'll have an inset of this particular vehicle before the exhaust reflector was added you're going to see the swing doors from the original engine access for the continental complete with little hole for the hand crank on the left hand side will be a blanked off circular panel about yea big and that was the original location of the exhaust for the commons track tension is done in the typical sherman track tension manner i've done it in other sherman videos if you really are all that interested and i don't blame you for it but if you are go find one of the other sherman videos i've done and you can have a look at the track tension system there if you look under the hull you can also see the support so the the bogey on the side is bolted to the side it's also a little underfloor support as well just to help take the weight of the vehicle otherwise it's basically stowage israelis love putting stowage on their vehicles i'm perfectly happy with this because i firmly believe that your own gear is better on your own tank yes it can be a problem with somebody machine guns your tank and that means that machine guns your gear but on the other hand you're not wondering oh where is first sergeant with my sleeping bag and it just makes life so much simpler so that's it for the back next stop is the engine deck [Music] the engine deck of course is a complete reconfiguration so if you recall your typical continental engine deck has a long panel just behind the turret with an angled air vent on it and raised barriers around the outside well of course once they replace the continental with the commons the internal configuration is completely different and this panel no longer works so all they did was they took that long panel cut it right down the middle took the two halves and rotated them 90 degrees so what you're looking at here are the original basically m4a1 type engine deck cover but because it's a slightly different shape wasn't a a perfect rectangle as it were they've had to add a four inch spacer here just to fit in the gap other items on the engine deck on the far corner you're going to see the other latching point for the tow cable and you'll only see the m50s in israeli service with one tow cable per vehicle which may be a little bit odd because usually these days we use the two but if you think about it it's not really necessary to have two because all they happened is if you're recovering a tank with another tank by tow cable you already have two tanks there and each one has one katow cable so you have two tow cables available to tow your tank very simple gun travel lock is obviously located here big one that they had to move because of the length of the gun otherwise the original travelock of course on the sherman was on the front the exhaust was relocated in the 70s from that earlier position down below to up here the israelis love welding numbers and lettering or whatever onto things just in case paint scrapes off so on a lot of the fuel ports for example you'll see hebrew lettering this one doesn't behind me but the one over there may have and it just says what is underneath to keep it simple for the fuelers or whoever's putting fluids in to make sure you don't put the wrong fluid into the wrong hatch otherwise underneath here is the vt8460 it's the last of a long lines that come in v8 engines starting with the v8 380 and well it's basically in the name so vt8 means it's a v8 turbocharged 460 is the horsepower and the only real difference between the 460 and 430 is a higher pressure system which also meant though that you had huge clouds of smoke coming out of this thing really obvious and the reliability probably wasn't what it should have been so the last thing to do is open up the panel have a quick look inside the first thing you're going to see is a very very large yellow air filter canister there is one on the other side as well then further down below you're going to see a large yellow engine and actually a fair bit of space otherwise this brings us now to an end of part one and of course part two is when we go around the various crew positions it'll come out in a couple of weeks so in the meantime while you're waiting use the link down below if you're not ready playing world of tanks it'll give you something to do while you're biting your nails wondering what the inside of the tank looks like so until then from southern nevada and the lads of battlefield vegas take care i'll talk to you then and you'll also notice something all right

Channel: World of Tanks - Official Channel

Views: 160,969

Keywords: World of Tanks, Tanks, World of tanks gameplay, Wargaming, World of tanks PC, Strategy Game, MMO, Free Multiplayer, Multiplayer Game, Military tanks, Tank Videos, Nicholas Moran wot, The Chieftain Wot, Nick The Chieftain, Inside the Chieftains Hatch, Chieftain Talks, Chieftain Teaches, Nick Drives tanks wot, world of tanks nick moran, wwii tanks wot, m50, battlefield vegas, israeli tank, israeli sherman tanks, israeil m4 sherman, M50/51 Super Sherman, ISherman

Id: _KyNYO03g1E

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021