Tank Overhaul - Episode 2 - The Panzerkampfwagen V Panther

armed with a workshop full of tools guided by detailed research these restoration crews are bringing a legend back to life [Music] this is the german-built panzer camp wagon five the panther one of the most feared tanks of the second world war lethal accurate almost unstoppable one-on-one nothing the allies had could take it down even today the panthers influence lives on and now the original tanks are so rare they're being hunted all over the world to be rescued from oblivion [Music] [Music] some people collect stamps some people collect coins [Applause] then there are collectors who work on a massive scale you want to collect tanks you'll need a stack of cash you've got to handle a blowtorch like a scalpel and you've got to know your history down to every last nut and bolt this is jacques littlefield he's assembled one of the largest private tank collections in the world and it's on display in portola valley california collection at this point has approximately 220 vehicles most of them are combat vehicles as opposed to soft-skinned vehicles at about 65 or actual battle tanks this is kevin wheatcroft stationed in arnsby england kevin has more than 230 military vehicles last year it hit me and i realized that between two and four years for a restoration i'm not going to live long enough to restore everything that i own that's impossible both kevin and shock are extremely wealthy they have to be a single restoration can cost millions you need a fully loaded workshop and a team of experts who can create new parts find old ones and know how to put it all back together for serious collectors there's always a holy grail [Music] built in germany baptized in battle in 1943 a tank so deadly so feared russian crews would capture them and use them as their own the formidable panzer camp fagin five panther the panther is a particularly interesting tank historically it's considered by many people to be the best tank design of world war ii to me the panther is probably the the most special of all the german tanks it looked right it sounded right and most times it worked right the panther terrified the allies for good reason its 75 millimeter gun was deadly accurate from over 3 000 yards away its armor was so tough allied guns couldn't penetrate it [Music] facing off against an allied tank the kill ratio was all in the panthers favor once the panther was sorted technically for battle it was virtually unstoppable in its time and worked on a ratio of about five shermans or nine t-34s there's a kill ratio to knock one out so that gives you an idea of how impressive the panther really was [Music] today a functioning panther tank is one of the rarest machines in the world both jacques and kevin have spent years slowly bringing their panthers back to life the panther owners club is a very very unique club and there's only four or fivers in the world i found out the hard way once you start it's it's a very very expensive road and once you part way down it there's really no turning back i think we always kind of look at each other and wonder are we both out of our minds or what if you want to assemble a tank first you need to assemble the right crew jacques has brought together some of the best in the world greg taylor is the panthers project manager well i've had an interest in military vehicles since i was a kid in fact i had a world war ii dodge weapons carrier that i drove to high school dave marion started here when he was still in high school he's a wizard with a blowtorch or a laptop one of my responsibilities is to help figure out how to rebuild or replace or create the pieces that were missing or damaged on the vehicle so i will take the original pieces that are damaged and measure them and dimension them and figure out how to rebuild them [Applause] keith bowles can fix just about anything with or without the manual we have approximately 400 years worth of work here so i hope i stay long enough to make it during the second world war germany only produced about 6 000 panthers tiny numbers compared to the 50 000 sherman tanks cranked out by the us after the war most panthers became scrap metal so even finding a panther today is next to impossible jacques panther quest began thousands of miles from his home and stretches back to a tough grim war [Music] poland january 1945 german and soviet forces were locked in a death struggle knocked out in battle a 45-ton panther sinks to the bottom of the blacknitta river the sunken treasure remains there for over 40 years waiting for a second chance [Music] and this panther is lucky enough to get it i bought it from a german collector and he'd had it for about 10 years he purchased it from a fellow in uh in poland who'd actually pulled it out of the river the hull was reasonably tactile and destroyed a number of places but the turret had been completely blown apart when the panther was first delivered it was about the sorriest condition of any vehicle we'd ever had delivered here i thought it was unrestorable and if we did restore it it'd take at least 10 years everything that you looked at was either cracked rusted really heavily that all the hydraulic tubing was bent and rusted and damaged it was almost like a dream you know we're really going to do this because it's going to commit the shop to many years of work when i went over to jock to get some sort of reassurance from him he said well basically this is probably the most challenging project we'll ever have to rebuild the panther the crew live and breathe a whole range of disciplines it's working with medalists working with wood is worth the electricity it's working with hydraulics and then on top of that to try to do it historically so you're researching the paints and the materials like that that adds a certain amount of complexity to it as well when you're rebuilding a 45-ton tank you're going to need some heavy-duty help you'll notice in the shop we have a 15-ton overhead crane and we have hydraulic cylinders that go up to 50 60 and 100 tons to pull things apart so a lot of time and effort goes into figuring out how to remove the piece how to restore the piece without damaging the piece of equipment or us i have stitches here from a grinder and stitches here from a piece of sheet metal so uh i guess it dad's character the team is not only putting together a tank as they scrape off the paint untangle the electrical systems and open up sealed compartments they're also unraveling a mystery how did this tank end up at the bottom of the blackneta river was it hit by another tank or by a soviet rocket did the engine die in the heat of battle did sabotage take down the mighty machine jacques team will have to salvage every possible clue to uncover the mysterious death of their [Music] panther born and built in germany shattered in poland during world war ii transported to what was once enemy territory this panther tank is getting an extreme makeover this is the world's largest private collection of military vehicles jacques littlefield's team have set themselves a huge challenge a burnt out rusted panther tank is going to be restored with military precision we try and keep the same welding process that was used originally if they used arc welding originally we put the pieces back together with arc welding and we use the same type of rods the same process and we try and make everything look the same try to replicate the width of the welds and the shape of the bead and make it look exactly the same [Music] in preparation for surgery the tank is stripped down and examined from top to bottom [Music] we take the major pieces off usually the turret the tracks the engine we evaluate what can be reused what has to be completely replaced and then of course what we're missing when we're cleaning out the vehicle on this vehicle we found the slide for a world war ii german handgun we found unused machine gun rounds that would have been used for the bow gun or the coax gun that's in the turret we found a flare gun cartridge long after this panthers final action dave found himself under fire we had vacuumed out the interior of the vehicle fairly extensively and i was using a large rosebud torch to heat a suspension component up in the front corner and i put the torch down in this area where there was still a machine gun round and the thing went off and my ears were ringing and i thought i'd been shot i checked for puncture wounds and it was it was pretty scary because you didn't know i didn't know it was there and but obviously i found it with the torch yeah i hear this bang and i was really loud and uh i yelled over are you all right dave and you know i didn't he didn't say anything at first you know and then yeah okay you know everybody in the shop heard it rushed to the scene are you okay the panther was known for its in-your-face design features the panthers front armor was angled and this gave it a deadly edge in combat the chief advantage of sloped armor is the fact that if you take say like on the front of the panther the glacis they call it the upper piece of plate is a little bit thicker than three inches and when you take a three inch plate and lay it down that plate essentially becomes thicker there's a longer distance that a projectile would have to travel through it and you also have a deflection factor where a projectile that may hit that angle plate may just bounce deflect right all over the vehicle the panthers sloped armor was copied directly from the enemy from the russian t-34 prior to the invasion of russia in june of 1941 a german tank design tended to be as many other countries did basically with vertical sides basically a block design and uh once the germans saw the russian tank they realized instantly that this was a superior design and i think it was a real shock to them this panther isn't giving the restoration crew any breaks after one world war and decades immersed in a river the turret is too far gone to be saved but the damage yields tantalizing clues about the panthers final moments [Music] when the tank arrived of course the turret was separate and it was obviously fractured and blown apart by an explosion that was the first apparent thing we found the entire top plate armor plate was warped real heavily we think from the explosion and then we had a piece of armor on the left side that is about 5 8 thick that was completely shattered so the panther took a savage hit strong enough to shatter heavy armor plate and push back the tank's firewall with the engine attached where did that explosion come from another tank a mine a rocket at close range as the crew rebuilds their panther it's possible all the answers they're seeking could remain submerged forever beneath the surface of the black needle river under the california sun and in the english countryside two tank crews are bringing german panthers back to life brian and alan rudder work at the kevin wheatcroft collection one of the biggest in the world in a tank workshop sometimes just unscrewing a rusted nut and bolt can turn into a major headache you should be able to rotate this to get to the anchor bolts at the back that hold the whole assembly the backing plate on and you can't get to them because it's corroded solid panther tank's been in the workshop now for something like four years although we've worked on it for about two and a half it took a year just to take it apart this thing had stood for 50 years in a french scrap yard one of those things i've wanted as a child i saw the pictures in the comics and in the war films and i wanted one no it's still got the size once we get that all that undone and then in a drum off i want to pull it out that way out the hull hang it on there it's quite a heavy thing the end plug's gone which is a shame but the other plugs are still in so there's a good chance of it being reasonable condition heating up the metal can help loosen parts that have been locked in place for decades if that fails there's always the last resort cut the piece off we don't like cutting stuff it's the last resort and then in the end it's just not feasible you have to give up admit defeat [Music] there's a circuit that goes on there you're supposed to take the circlip off through one of those windows and when you pull this whole assembly off that's supposed to slide off of here but that's just corroded solid i was warming it prying it but until the end last resort it's been a lot of heartache but great fun it's a mixture of sort of archaeology uh mechanics and just the joy of seeing something come back to life again in combat the panther was feared for many reasons ferociously accurate the panthers gun is considered by many to be the best of the second world war this gun fired 75 millimeter rounds and could take out enemy tanks at 3 000 yards [Music] if an american sherman ever came face to face with the panther it was no contest at the shop here we have a lot of tours come through we have tankers that were in world war ii that come up tell some of the horror stories about being in a sherman tank getting shot at some of them come up and just look at the panther now and they just tremble looking at that gun because they're still scared of it the panthers barrel was more than twice as long as the sherman's and this gave it a much higher muzzle velocity that was the primary advantage the gun had it had a velocity in excess of 3000 feet per second depending on the kind of ammunition using at the time the sherman tank was on the order of 2000 feet per second the velocity which will determine both your accuracy and how much armor you can go through how much energy you can deliver to the target the sherman tank had a similar sized gun but a lower velocity weapon and the sherman didn't have the ability to penetrate any part of the panther but the panther gun had the ability to penetrate basically any section of the sherman because of the higher velocity of the main gun it was a one shot one kill kind of an affair you know a panther versus a sherman one of the toughest challenges for the crew is the panthers turret it's one of the most complex pieces on the most complex tank of its day [Applause] this turret is uh so badly shattered and has had so many shoddy repair attempts that we've determined that it would just be better to start over with new material somebody's attempted to weld these cracks up with the wrong welding rod which you can see it then cracked again if it was less damaged we would attempt to repair the original pieces but this was so far gone that we determined that we would just reuse the mantlet casting and the casting for the ventilator and basically start over from scratch while the crew rebuild their panther a mystery hangs over them how did their panther end up at the bottom of a river in poland [Music] the tank isn't talking but it has left behind a kind of fingerprint [Music] stamped into the hull are serial numbers they're still legible which means german tank records might hold a clue [Music] the military archives show jacques panther was originally issued to the 16th panzer regiment in july 1944. six months later the regiment was decimated on the russian front the records don't reveal how the panther went down to defeat but they do lead us to the panthers original base in bergen [Music] today it's home to the ultra-modern leopard 2. with its sloped front advanced armor and powerful gun the leopard is in many ways the modern descendant of the panther the leopard's gun is made by the same company that built the panthers gun firing 120 millimeter rounds the leopard can knock out a target two and a half miles away the best articles the leopard's gun is considered to be the best on the battlefield and the american army agrees former enemies now use the same german-made gun on their tanks [Music] modern tank crews take for granted that they can fire accurately on the move the panther could fire while in motion but it probably wouldn't be able to hit its target [Music] during the second world war american engineers tried to achieve gun stabilization with electric gyroscopes mounted in the turret the german approach was completely different they tried to stabilize the entire tank with a highly complex torsion bar suspension this created 20 inches of suspension travel in other words a very smooth ride that was years ahead of its time i've seen film footage of panthers in motion both on the terrain and on a test track that has specific bumps and you can see that the the hull basically remains about level and suspension moves rapidly up and down compensating for those bumps the contemporaries like a sherman or t-34 they have very limited suspension travel and they are a very stiff rough riding vehicle that's fairly fatiguing for the crew at jack's shop it's time to start work on the panthers 12-cylinder 700 horsepower engine engines are keith bowles area of specialty our uh panther engine being sleeved the cylinder walls are not cast into the block they slip out a sleeved engine it's like a diesel engine you take the sleeve out and put a new sleeve in well you can't buy a maybach sleeve for a panther and so we have to have made lightweight and powerful maybach engines were originally designed to power aircraft this created serious problems for the panther the engine uh the engine block itself it was really needlessly light and fragile versus what it could have been we have pictures of failures where that connecting rod failures and they had head gasket problems because they had tried to keep the components the weight of the components so light early versions of the engine came with a serious design flaw the panthers were always gasoline powered and whenever you have gasoline if the the engine isn't tuned properly if the ignition timing isn't right it's possible to get what they call a stack fire or to spit through the carburetor and the problem with gasoline is that it's also very explosive in confined areas and that fire can very quickly move into the crew compartment [Music] the factory that built the panther engine is gone but the company remains today mtu builds state-of-the-art engines for the german army's leopard 2 tanks [Music] the leopards thrive on mtu's 1500 horsepower engines [Applause] weighing over 61 tons the leopards can reach a road speed of 45 miles per hour unlike the panther they burn diesel which gives greater mileage and is less combustible than gasoline michael groddick is a senior technical director at mtu our main challenges is always to get the most compact diesel engines which are achievable if we make an engine or propulsion system much more compact immediately the safe volume and weight will be used for additional equipment maybe a bigger gun maybe more fuel maybe more ammunition maybe a stronger armor protection to protect the tank against mines and things like that unlike their modern counterparts the panthers burned gasoline a highly flammable fuel and a deadly factor in a confined space could a fire have taken out jacques littlefield's panther you know originally we thought there had been a fire inside the vehicle but on the panther they use wooden blocks that are machined to hold the main gun rounds and that wood was still intact and also a large portion of the original wiring for the vehicle the insulation was still intact which would imply because the wood was never burned and the wiring was still in place that there had been an explosion but actually no fire if the panther didn't succumb to fire what else could have destroyed such a powerful machine [Music] jacques littlefield's crew in california is bringing a demolished panther tank back to life they've spent over three years on this project dave marion has redesigned the shattered turret which is being rebuilt off-site when completed the refurbished turret will fit into the turret ring turned out pretty good yeah fortunately we were able to find one in uh france that a collector had that was i don't know if it was brand new but it was in very good shape and the one that of course had that we'd had was both damaged and very badly rusted and while you can always rebuild something like that that would have been quite expensive to do with the turret ring in place next up is the panthers turret basket greg taylor has been rebuilding the crew seats the german armored vehicles all had a standard seat frame we have one good original seat that we've removed from the 222 armored car we were able to copy that and i what i did is i made a fixture for the original seat that i could weld up and we had a bunch of parts made of tubing that we could weld together to make replica seats let's start okay man that is tight yeah but it works german precision advanced armor a powerful gun and unmatched suspension all made the panther a masterpiece of war and that wasn't all it had an extra gear mechanism which enabled it to engage in neutral steer this allowed the panthers tracks to move in opposite directions at the same time the neutral steer on the panther gives you more maneuverability at low speeds so it can almost kind of pivot in position and so all modern vehicles are like that now the panther i guess was one of the first vehicles to have a neutral steer capability but the us didn't have that until much later for modern tanks like the leopard 2 and m1 abrams the panthers neutral steer legacy is essential in tank warfare seconds with your back to the enemy could prove fatal neutral steering means is that you have the ability to turn in place 360 degrees and in tight spots specifically in urban areas where you don't have the ability to go around the corner turn and come back or to do a u-turn you know the gun stays on the target while the tank is maneuvering out with the turret ring installed the crew deals with the panthers final drives final drives are gears that transfer power from the transmission to the drive sprockets but on the panther these gears had a serious flaw if you look at the actual choice of gears they use they use basically straight spur gears these three gears involve a double reduction system and straight spur gears and there's a lot of stress on just one gear tooth when you do that if you compare that with uh for instance was used on the sherman tank which used basically a set of double herringbone gears with more teeth and more surface area really the sherman gears were a better design and a better choice the flaw with the panthers final drives was compounded by the fact that they were designed for a much lighter tank the final weight of a panther is about 45 tons and they were intended for a vehicle that weighed between 32 and 35 tons the vehicle continued to get heavier and heavier and heavier as they added more armor added more components that made it heavy a common problem in military equipment is that you start out with a component like a final drive that was intended for one weight range and it gets heavier and heavier and heavier and then the final drive is a weak point [Music] to avoid stripping the gears panther drivers were ordered to operate at reduced speeds as a result the panther could never reach its full combat potential and when the tank broke down on the battlefield the crew was virtually paralyzed by the panthers complex design on the panthers specifically if you were to have say a transmission failure or a final drive failure it would take days to get down to the final drives because everything like the driver's seat all the controls all that stuff has to be removed before you can get actually to the final drive the wheels on the panther are interleaved and you know so to get to one inner wheel you have to take several of the outer wheels off in layers to get down to that one damaged wheel and then you had both sets of torsion bars to worry about they did have access holes so you could get them from either side but you often had to go to the other side of the tank to have access to push or pull a bar which meant you had to take off the track and the wheels on the other side of the tank the german army fought the war relatively close to home ground the americans were fighting an ocean away so american engineers came up with a time and life-saving concept rapid field repair to remove the transmission on the panther uh requires a big crane and disassembling quite a bit of stuff inside to remove the transmission on a sherman for instance the entire front end comes off so the transmission and the final drives can come out really quite easily and be put back very easily so that would really affect your ability to if you had damage in the front end to repair that tank in the field with lessons learned on the battlefield rapid field repair is an integral component of modern tank design modern propulsion units like mtu's power pack for the german leopard 2 tank are self-contained these power packs house the engine final drives and transmission all in one unit changing engines is literally plug and [Music] play each day the crew gets the panther a little more functional but they're still no closer to finding out what destroyed their tank over 60 years ago they know some kind of explosion was involved was it sabotage as the war progressed german production relied more and more on forced labor millions of prisoners were forced to work in german factories some would protest through acts of sabotage during their panther restoration alan and brian grapple with the final drives but something doesn't make sense the bolts are loose they've not been tightened up all the bolts are loose on that cover whoever did it happen to do a very good job we found all sorts of things from cigarette butts pushed into oil galleys holes drilled into oil galleys to to to lose oil pressure break components manufactured in the wrong fashion so that they weren't as as useful as they should have been all manner of things just to slow the war machine up where the final drives on jack's panther damaged in an act of sabotage i've heard stories and even talked to people who had worked in these factories who talked about you know knocking off a gear tooth and then kind of gluing it back on we haven't seen anything like that that i can point to sabotage is ruled out but that just raises more questions in the final months of the war on the bleak russian front something somehow took down this panther cortola valley california [Music] jacques littlefield's restoration crew is fitting their panther tank with a new turret even without the gun the massive turret still weighs over 15 000 pounds there's no margin for error there's very small clearances between the bottom of the turret and the top of the deck as the turret turns it can interfere with the driver's hatches or the engine hatches and you're talking you know a third of an inch in some cases so you had to get everything right and of course if the turret doesn't turn exactly around the basket that hang underneath it will be ah brown and it won't track properly either they've been waiting three months for this day [Music] the fit has to be perfect [Music] okay come down a little bit probably going to have to shift that way a little bit more just a tiny bit there you go you got to kind of watch the back too keith yeah come come down a little bit slow yeah come down slow how's it look over there greg hold it hold on [Music] come back up a little bit [Music] it's hitting on the back on the back corner here keith yeah it needs to go forward forward [Music] did that go down that time how's it look over there i think you're down i think it's down yeah i think so okay looks good from here okay i'm turning dead turns [Music] after three long years jack's crew has victory in its sights now it's down to the final details after all when you're working on things like seats and radios it shows you you've come a long way you're not you know banging away on rusty our chunks of iron and rust we're past that point pretty much and as the panther nears completion the story of her death can finally be dredged out from the past [Music] the black anita river flows past the polish village of bialetsky mills jacques panther spent over 40 years submerged beneath these waters henrik growlitz was there that day in 1990 when the broken panther was dragged out of the river edvard tachinsky was a terrified 16 year old witness the day the tank was destroyed both men can now open a window on the final moments of jacques littlefield's panther january 1945 in the dying months of the second world war the soviet army was pounding the germans into submission the battle around the village of bialetsky mills was ferocious and unforgiving [Music] [Music] which is [Music] under fire from fighter bombers the panther tries to escape across the frozen river in many sections the river runs three feet deep but the crew makes a fatal mistake they try to take their 45-ton tank across a section of the river that is much deeper than they realized and soon to be overwhelmed by the enemy the panthers crew followed standard military procedure [Music] the standard uh procedure with any army is that if you abandon a tank that's otherwise operational the enemy might capture it as there is a procedure for setting charges [Music] the source of the mysterious explosion that destroyed the turret is finally known there was a charge set in the turret because the turret was completely blown apart i suspect from looking at the way the rust and the other damage patterns are that perhaps it sank down as far as the top of the hull so that when the explosion went off it blew the turret apart but did not do lots of other damage even to some of the thinner pieces of sheet metal inside be the mystery of the littlefield panther has been solved but completing this mechanical puzzle requires cooperation [Music] jack littlefield and dave marion have crossed the atlantic to meet up with kevin wiecroft and allen and brian rudder both crews have spent years restoring their panthers and throughout the journey they have helped each other get closer to fulfilling their dream [Music] jack littlefield is obviously a renowned collector he's a great guy to get along with he's very helpful very free with information we've shared a lot of parts and a lot of knowledge between his mechanics and our mechanics it's really worked out very very nicely it saves us a lot of time and effort and because his mechanics were the farthest ahead they were the ones we would call when we when we had a problem how did you take this apart how did you take that apart what did you do for this and of course they had all the answers with both teams helping each other completion of the panthers is within range jack's crew is almost ready to celebrate when uh i get this engine put back together and we first fire it up and it runs great it starts instantly it's going to be a a day to party well i'll tell you what if there's any alcohol around i'll probably have a drink that's it be pretty special probably cry anything else after this would be kind of like child's play i think you're taking a complicated vehicle anyway and trying to just make something out of nothing basically the panther born in germany destroyed in poland now reincarnated in california for die hard collectors in peacetime a restored panther is a dream come true but once upon a war coming face to face with this tank was a nightmare you'd never forget [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Questar Entertainment

Views: 1,355,035

Rating: 4.7855844 out of 5

Keywords: military, history, axis powers, tank, Tank Overhaul, World War II, battle tanks, Poland, german tanks, German Tank Museum, Panther Tank, Panther Tanks, tank mechanics, military history, tank restoration, overhauling tanks, The Panther Tank, German PzKpfw Panther, German PzKpfw Panther Tank, tank collection, questar, Jacques Littlefield, Panzerkampfwagen V Panther, restoration, panther tank restoration, tanks, panzer tank, old tanks

Id: ejq44cdeMO8

Length: 50min 19sec (3019 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/DarkDeLaurel]

Great series and too bad that it is no longer on the air. Also the one guys collection was auctioned off a few years ago.

[u/The_Chieftain_WG]

The littlefield Panther is the one I filmed the Inside the Chieftain's Hatch on.