We're restoring a Canadian Centurion at the Oshawa Regiment museum in Ontario, Canada.
I wanted to give an update because it's actually starting to feel like we're getting somewhere!
She's running and driving with the rebuilt Meteor we got from the States, although only inside so far due to my reluctance to get clay mud all over the undercarriage when we are in the process of cleaning and painting it.
The engine starts really well. The key is not to use that stupid choke plate (aka strangler). God knows why that is installed. All that happens is the full intake manifold vacuum acting on the carbs sucks huge amounts of fuel through the main jets and because it's an updraft carb, none of this fuel gets up into the intake manifolds because the choke restricts the air flow so much, and it all dumps down into the plenum and pours out of the automatic plenum drain tubes. Rolls Royce designers obviously weren't idiots so there must have been some logic behind the choke design but I don't know what it was.
Anyway, I have a electric priming pump installed to fill the carbs to save the hassle of using the rather inaccessible priming levers on the installed fuel pumps. After that, 3 or 4 pumps on the gas pedal (which does shoot gas up into the intake manifolds) and she fires right up.
The clutch rebuild showed the massive plain plates and friction plates were all still in spec, and only a couple of new bearings and seals were required. It works well and is much lighter in operation than I expected.
Steering, including neutral steering, also works very well, which is a relief as all I did with the transmission was remove the top covers to do a visual check of gears and shifter mechanism. All looked good and fishing around the bottom with a magnet picked up no worrying pieces, and oil was clean. The final test will be driving it around the arena to confirm that all gears are there and shifting is manageable.
One thing I noticed is that there is a shift lock-out mechanism (to prevent the selector mechanism from trying to select two gears at the same time) in the gear selector box up in the driver's compartment, and also in the transmission. So it is very important to synchronize the two lockout mechanisms so that the driver can easily select each gear. I don't think the manual mentioned this requirement.
Right now we are in external bodywork repair and painting mode. Some track guards were beyond repair so new ones were fabricated. All the side bins were really rough too so repair (cutting, patching, grinding, and painting) is in progress.
I should say at this point that, like most museums, money's a bit tight, so management encourages the use of free internal labour to fix stuff, rather that farming it out to a local fab shop. And when I say "encourages", I mean "insists". So we don't always achieve perfection, even though we aim for it.
The photo below shows our progress so far.
Even though this tank is nominally Mark 5/2, it came with the full gyro stabilizing power elevation and traverse (which I believe was a later Mark?). It looks quite intact so my personal dream is to get this working and have the only tank at the museum with functioning gun stabilizing. Time will tell.
Malcolm
