Centurion Arrives in BC

[Aide Memoire]

The bins have the bottoms rotted out of them for the most part, and the sheet metal above the tracks needs to be replaced entirely, but it's all flat stock. Everything else is excellent right down to the road wheels.

Found something interesting. Anthony Sewards posted a pic of the data plate of the Cent he's involved with which has the Serial No. and British VRN number side-by-side but not the CFR (I've asked if he knows it.)

Serial No. of that Cent: 134-190 'March 1952'
Serial No. of our Cent: 142-190

To me, as logical guesswork, that looks like it was a run of 190 tanks for that particular block, and the two tanks are 8 serial numbers apart. Anthony's tank has the British VRN 07 BA 11, which is part of a contiguous block of VRNs not assigned in my list which has nothing from 06 BA 38 right through 07 BA 25 connected to anything English or Australian. Making an *enormous* leap-of-faith, that might make ours 07 BA 19, but as Ed said - things wind up out of sequence all the time for whatever reason.

Either way it would seem to make it made in the same batch around March 1952 as Anthony's one - which would include it among the ones built new for Canada and not any Korean retread.

One other interesting thing...I didn't track back the MIKAN numbers, but back to that one pic from Harold's site:

http://silverhawkauthor.com/images/s...o--4234066.jpg

Ed seems quite correct in that the 1964 date is most certainly wrong. I think it's RCDs right after they took delivery of the first Centurions as per this:

"The first 21 Centurions were delivered to the Royal Canadian Dragoons in Germany in March 1952, where they served with the Canadian contingent of the NATO forces based there."

Which would explain both the earlier sequence number "CDN 03 BA 47" and the lack of a (well...visible at least) CFR.

I have some more turret pics to post in a separate post.