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Military ST4 #1799

Simply awesome.

are the rings in the floor rear simply lifting rings or are they some sort of a mount?

do you suppose the floor was metal from the start?

I have a hulk of a ST4 here at dysfunction junction and I was going to make a roadster out of it, But I am starting to like the idea of a military clone.
 
The Royal Marines moved these around by helicopter all the time and originally had permanent chain slings run underneath - the half moon cut outs on the bottom edge of the bumper were for these. It was not very balanced though and a few were dropped from height when they were swinging about and threatening to de-stabilize the helicopter so they changed to permanent eyes attached to the rear cross member and bars either side of the bonnet running down to the chassis legs ( you can see these on the unrestored pictures)
All the military ones were canvas tilts over the rear so could easily attach slings to the rear eyes, but the wombat equipped ones had guide rails there for the wheels of the gun carriage so they only had the earlier chain slings - I have not got round to fitting those yet.
Another identifying feature of the military ones is the 60mm oil temp and fuel gauge,s which are 24v but seem to run fine on 12v , and the 24v plug on the side of the bonnet which was used for jump starting or power for the winch that attached to that tube on the front bumper.
 
I have not managed to find an original WOMBAT Anti-Tank gun so have decided to fabricate a replica.
I started with the wheels as everything is scaled off them as I do not have fully dimension'd drawings and will have to judge it all off photographs. I had some old 12" trailer wheels in the yard but they were too wide so had to machine the rims off and weld them together to fit 3" wide tyres - I also removed the 4 stud centers and made some discs and hubs to take bearings direct.
The axle and center of the carriage were fabricated from 1.5mm steel sheet and then all welds radius'd to try and create a "cast" look to it - bit of a faff but coming out ok so far. I need to get some ally tube to make the barrel next, hopefully my son can 3d print an insert for plain tube to give it authentic looking rifling.
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A bit more progress on the WOMBAT.
I fabricated the front A frame from steel sheet and the carriage is now complete ready for painting so I started on the barrel - this is 3 different diameters and made from 2 sizes of aluminium tube 127mm and 152mm - I cut 40mm out of a legth of 152mm and re-welded it to get a piece of 140mm to make up the mid section then welded them all together. The trunnion carrier is a piece of 160mm steel tube that used to be an air drier receiver I had lying around - knew it would come in handy one day!
I fired up the furnace to melt down some more old pistons and cast a lump of aluminium I could machine into the breech locking ring and then rolled up a cone of 1.5mm sheet to create the venturi tube - difficult to roll a cone by hand so it is a bit square sided - I will have to turn a wooden plug to go inside so I can hammer it a bit more true.
The locking collar for the breech is fab'd from 10mm plate then filled with aluminium so I could machine the grooves inside - just needs the hinge assembly adding now - this is quite complicated as one swing of the opening handle simultaneously turns the locking ring, retracts the firing pin, extracts the shell case and locks the ring into the closing position so the teeth engage correctly.
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I have now completed the main gun, but thought I had better see if it fits in the snow-trac before painting it. I managed to find a genuine number 75 type 1 gun-sight which I have fitted to give it a bit of authenticity - it has the correct graticule, engraved with range settings fro 300 - 2000 meters. All i need to do now is make an M8c spotting rifle to mount on top.

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Puckle said:
I have now completed the main gun, but thought I had better see if it fits in the snow-trac before painting it. I managed to find a genuine number 75 type 1 gun-sight which I have fitted to give it a bit of authenticity - it has the correct graticule, engraved with range settings fro 300 - 2000 meters. All i need to do now is make an M8c spotting rifle to mount on top.
Click to expand...
Other vehicles will have a lot of respect for you, so it should get you through rush hour traffic quicker!
 
Finally finished the spotting rifle and painted the main gun. The M8c replica was trickey because I wanted it to have a working bolt mechanism that would correctly chamber and eject the rounds - I bought some genuine 50cal spotter round cases with dummy bullets and also a genuine 20 round magazine that was ex Vietnam from an M50 Ontos so I could scale all the dimensions from that - the whole thing was finished by gun blueing which gives a nice authentic look to it.
I can now move on to restoring the 3rd snow-trac which has been bypassed whilst I played with the military one
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