Tank Chats #105 | Saladin | The Tank Museum

if you do like these tank chats do please subscribe to the tank museum's youtube channel we're going to have a look now at the saladin fv601 it was in the the old days we're going right back to the beginning though for a start having said salad in you you'll automatically think of alvis this isn't an elvis vehicle it's one of the few built by crossley but we'll come to that in a moment the whole idea of saladin was oh it was completely novel post-war they drawn up a whole load of drawings of armored cars and lightly tracked vehicles while they tried to make up their minds which one it was but as with all these things loads of ideas get pushed to the surface and none of them seem to materialize this vehicle appeared first of all as a um an armored vehicle but with a turret mounting a two pounder gun which was known as pipsqueak it was built in mock-up fashion full size we'll put a picture of that in later and otherwise it had the same basically the same chassis as this the only real difference between the salad in as you see it and pipsqueak was that pipsqueak had a three-man turret they could afford that with the two pounder gun for a start and this meant that they had a man who was equipped to drive in reverse he slid down into a seat and drove backwards now they couldn't have him in later versions i'll explain why in a minute so pipsqueak with the reverse driving position was absolutely unique in that respect it's worth looking at but no more it did never exist in marie in real life they do say that britain took the inspiration for this vehicle from the m38 which we knew as the wolf hound which was a six-wheeled armored car built in america and certainly it was six wheeled and certainly it had these triangular sort of bins between each pair of wheels to stow things in but otherwise the two vehicles are totally different different engine different transmission different suspension there was no connection at all except that they were six-wheelers and quite honestly if you produce a six-wheeler this is what you end up with whether you like it or not that's the way they were built now the idea was to give the project to alves of coventry and they were produced in fairly large numbers always meant to be but elvis having produced two prototypes were immediately pulled out to operate a um a version of the this thing called the saracen which is actually an armored personnel carrier it was quite similar but had the engine at the front end instead of the back and because they were called in to do this in a hurry because we needed the saracen for operations in malaya the saladin was pushed to the side at first it looked as if it was going to be cancelled or at least delayed but then crossley motors took it over now crosley motors in the old days before the second world war at least was a big company they produced cars buses trucks military vehicles half tracks or a whole host of things um a couple of armored cars we've got here and they were a big firm based in manchester in those days they've been famous during the first world war for their royal flying corps vehicles and had supported the raf and the the army ever since but by when this thing was built late 40s early 50s they'd fallen on hard times because they've become part of the acv group which was meant to be a sort of collective of commercial vehicle producers and they took over this thing and they really saw the salad in as a lifeline it was going to boost their um sales and make them a famous company again and they really looked forward to it now this didn't work although elvis had been pulled aside to build the saracen they built them very quickly and by the time they built them only six of these armored cars have been built by crossley and this is one of the six it's probably the only one left and therefore quite a famous vehicle itself we can always tell them apart by the number plate these things have civilian number plates the others the elvis built ones normally have the two digits two letters two digits military cereal the other difference is the turret it's somewhat longer on this vehicle than on the elvis but not enough to worry about and you can't see it anyway so all about it but you need to see the top to see the difference but it's basically the same so the crosley and the elvis armored cars are pretty well the same to look at they're powered by a rolls royce b80 engine which is an eight cylinder petrol engine it's mounted in the back in this case in the rear of the vehicle it drives through a five-speed pre-selector gearbox and with an auxiliary box that means that you can drive the thing you need the direction that's five speeds pre-selected by the driver and he drives it just like you would a daimler dingo or something like that and has power assisted steering the only thing is the driver's got the steering wheel the other way around to normal instead of being like this as you'd normally hold a wheel it's like that to sort of mix in with the slope of the front of the armor of the vehicle but the saladin in this form whether by elvis or alcohol by crosley is a three-man vehicle it has a driver a tank commander and a loader and that's all they cut they had to do away with the third man and the turret because they wanted a decent gun for this thing the two pounder was oh it's really had its day it was a pre-war weapon anyway even with new ammunition it wasn't really up to it so they were they decided to get this vehicle fitted with a new gun now there's nothing in the world that's disliked in britain more than a new gun you'll normally find they're trying to make that gun up out of um an old one or two or three old ones or the better bits of them but they had to produce a new gun and they produced a short barreled rifled 76 millimeter gun for this vehicle which is actually quite effective it's mounted as you can see at the front and gives the vehicle quite a punch it fires hash or high explosive hashes squash head ammunition which is an anti-tank round but you you'd have to get pretty close to a tank to do it serious damage and i wouldn't advise that in a vehicle like this the armor thickness is fairly thin it's about 16 millimeters on the sides reduced to about 12 millimeters on the front but it's made thicker by the fact that the armor on the front sloping which is supposed to give it more of a defensive quality but 16 mil is about the best except on the turret front but i think it's 32 mil and but then 16 all the way around elsewhere so it's easily clobbered if it isn't moving if it is moving it's a different matter of course but that's the basic vehicle it's let's say given it's got a good power unit rolls royce it's a military engine the b80 and it pushes this thing along at about 50 miles an hour when it's going flat out it steers on all four of the front wheels all six are driven but the four front wheels are all steered hydraulically assisted from the steering wheel of the driver's steering wheel in the cab so it's well controlled the only thing is the only problem with is it has one single differential and that differential acts between the wheels on the left-hand side and those on the right-hand side now that's okay across country because it's there's a fair amount of give and take ground and some soft ground that the wheels can sort themselves out on but on the road it's different you get quite a lot of wind up in the suspension or in the transmission between the left side the right side and the only way to ease this was to pull over onto the edge of the road for a while and raise one set of wheels up onto the pavement and thus it gives it a chance to sort itself out it's just a question remembering to do it otherwise you've got hub reduction gears on all wheels all the wheel stations and wall is the same otherwise in fact they're interchangeable but only the back set is fixed the rest is they have torsion bars working the suspension on the wheels torsion bars running horizontally rather than crosswise so they go four and aft and they give the wheels a bit of suspension they used to say that you could run one of these vehicles on any four after any two others have been blown off by mines that's a load of rubbish they have been known to work quite well with one wheel missing say the middle wheel on one side and the front wheel on the other side but you've really got to select which of the two you blow off before they will blow off before the vehicle falls over that's the um the truth of the matter but that's what they used to say used to make a lot of claims like that load of rubbish most of them still it's quite a nice vehicle it was a good looking vehicle it lasted a long time sold well on the export market it really was a very popular vehicle in its day but it stays now past unfortunately it's gone on to other things and the saladin although it a few were produced with a 90 millimeter gun later on that all failed the only versions of it i can think of there was one amphibious version with a folding screen which still survives it's around somewhere but uh god knows where the idea was you raised the floating screen and the thing went swimming powered by its wheels of course so it went nowhere really and there was another version with two of swing fire missiles fitted to the sides of the turret the idea was it would go out find a tank and destroy it with a swing fire missile but again you've got to be very lucky to get a tank with a missile and um although it was built and the missiles were fitted there's no account of them ever entering service like that the elvis was the production version crossley had really set their hearts on making a fortune out of this vehicle elvis resumed production the minute they'd finished production of the saracens and from then on it became an elvis vehicle from start to finish so all the production vehicles that you see demonstrations that kind of thing are all elvis built and all regular army vehicles fv601c i think is the actual um designation of them to distinguish them from the b series vehicles built by crossley but that's the only real difference they're still powered by the same engine and the same transmission the same armament whether they're closely built or elvis built but quite an interesting vehicle all the same in these difficult times obviously your support is really valued so please do keep following us on social media do subscribe to our channel and and if you've got the opportunity perhaps order something from our shop join one of our schemes like patreon or our friends organization and we'll try and keep going with giving you some content to keep you informed and entertained

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 240,823

Rating: 4.9785061 out of 5

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, david fletcher tank chats, tank chat, tank chats, tank chats david fletcher, tank museum bovington, the tank museum tank chats, saladin, armoured car, cold war, british cold war, saladin armoured car, alvis, crossley

Id: HOgIikyFL7M

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020