How To: Restoration of Ford M8 armoured car US Ordnance number 7373

[colin jones]

Hi Darryl, yes that's what I would do. Your joints would be just as strong after you're finished. I noticed that the original welds look like they're stainless so cutting a complete section out would be considerably harder to do but not impossible. I think you'd be happier with the result if it was original and it's only cut in pieces, not skeletonized.
Colin.

[Big D]

Hi Colin,

Thanks for that.

If we went that way, would we be best to proceed as per the other suggestion of a backing plate of a lighter gauge fitted inside each of those main sponson plates before fitting the small filler pieces?They would be virtually undetectable from the insid and would seem to make the process easier.

If I understand what the engineering guys were thinking, I gather they would torch cut down to the stainless welding to remove the old plates. Would that make sense?

Thanks.

[colin jones]

Well, as you have access to overhead gantry and forklift it would be easy to just turn it over for welding both sides. Stainless steel and torches don't go that well together so I would opt out of that one. You can certainly fill some wide gaps with mig and if you have some brass plate 50mm wide or so you can just weld over that and then take it away for some of the other areas that are too small for a fill but too big for straight welding. if you held some pieces of plate behind and had someone mark it with chalk you can then cut some rough fillers with the gas axe and fit and weld them in place. Just by the look at the photo's of what I can see I would estimate 2 days and it would be as good as new.
Colin.

[Big D]

Hi Colin,

Many thanks for that. Some really good food for thought there. I do like the idea of keeping those side sponsons intact and as original as possible, and that would certainly be a way of doing it.

The only drawback I can see with not removing the side sponson panels is that there is very limited access to the inner parts of channel etc in the hull and actually trying to join those pieces from inside the hull will be very difficult I'd say.

I'll go back to the engineering guys and have a talk about these options. The discussion certainly brought up lots for me to think about.

Thanks all!

[Big D]

Hi Andrew,

Apologies. I must have been replying to the posts from Dave, David and Terry and I completely missed your one. Thanks for the reply. It's interesting that there are a number of thoughts about how best to deal with this. I'm picking that in the hands of a good welder (not me) any one of these options will work.

As I say I'd like to keep it as original as possible but at the same time don't want to have to take out a mortgage to pay someone to do it! That is the benefit of the whole panel replacement approach, that's for sure.

Thanks Andrew. I'll let you know how I get on.