Has anyone with these reflectors ever tested them in the dark, mounted in the front bumper to see how well they actually work? If you think about it, they probably need some fairly strong direct light to do their job. A normal, oncoming vehicle headlight? Perfect! An oncoming blackout headlamp...?
They are cute little accessories but in the real driving world of the 1940's during the war:
- They are located in a restrictive position that is a dirt magnet.
- Just how much dust or dirt needs to accumulate on them before they stop reflecting?
- Just how far up the 'priority list' for a combat CMP driver would cleaning these reflectors be?
They strike me as the brainchild idea of some desk jockey somewhere in the system who had no real sense, or experience of the actual wartime operating environment. On a home base, paved road, blackout environment, these reflectors may have been maintainable, but realistically, just how many CMP's actually served in that type of environment?
Once the orders went out for addition of these reflectors, bumpers were probably changed and the new ones introduced into the system in the usual 'after SN XXX use YYY', but when the reflectors were deleted, the front bumper assemblies were probably in the system for a very long time. At the production end of the system, reflector bumpers may very well have been used into the first few years of Cab 13 production. In fact, it may have been more efficient on the assembly lines to simply keep stamping these bumpers out until the equipment making them needed overhaul/maintenance. From our position today, finding a reflector bumper on a Cab 13, or even late Cab 12 CMP should not be a green light (sorry about that) to try and find and install the reflectors. They very likely never existed on the vehicle in the first place.
Just a thought. To mount these reflectors you need the large hole on the front face of the bumper, along with two mounting screw holes- one each on upper and lower edges. If the two screw holes were a drilled item rather than punched, maybe that step was easy to delete in production as it might have been a secondary processing step at another work station from the stamping tool for the larger reflector openings on the face of the bumper. Maybe there are some front bumpers out there with the large reflector openings stamped in them, but no upper and lower mounting screw holes. That would confirm a sequential phaseout sequence on the production line.
David
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