Otter LRC CM4647296 comes home

[Jordan Baker]

Originally Posted by Niels V

The Humber Mk 4 and Panzer 3 we restored also had shims under the various hinges

Interesting. Some aspects of these vehicles are pretty crude, then they instal shims under hatch hinges.

[Jordan Baker]

Yesterday’s task in the few hours of shop time was spent getting this one part cleaned up and painted. The handle needed a bit of straightening and a small amount of welding done to fix up where the rod was cracking. One day the rest of the vehicle will look this good.

[Jordan Baker]

The rear viewing hatch was also removed. I’ve included some detail on the linkage assembly.

[Jordan Baker]

Lastly I picked up a needle gun. I needed something that would help remove the old layers of paint. It was proving very slow trying to sandblast off the postwar applied paint. I tried it out on the front hull and was quite pleased with how fast it was removing paint. This should definitely save time and materials when sandblasting.

[Jordan Baker]

The rear viewing hatch is pretty much all rebuilt. There were two castle nuts on the arm pivot bolts that needed replacing. They had taken a bit of a beating from weather coming in the open hatch over the years. Thankfully I found some matching ones on EBay. Bounce they arrive, the rusted ones will be replaced and cotter pins put in as well.

[Jordan Baker]

Next up is removing the heavy cast antenna cable hole covers. These were used to protect the cable hole in the hull armour. Interestingly when I removed them I discovered yellow paint on the metal under the KG#3 paint. I’m thinking they were shop markings during production of the Otter. There was also the remains of the right side antenna mount that had been ripped off the hull.

[Jordan Baker]

When I removed the left cover I noticed more yellow paint under the layers of green. This time it was painted the numbers 277. After sandblasting I found the hand stamped numbers of 326. I suspect these were done during production but as for why, no idea.