http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaLTkGjlgxM

What is the compression ratio of that engine?

Looks and sounds wonderful - great work Littlefield crew!

I assume Jacques is at the controls; he has had to wait 5 years for this moment.

Fantastic news, glad all went well, wishing I was there for the moment.

Wow, the lack of side skirts sure make it look like it rides high.

Oooh, beauty!

Was there a reason they didn't use fuel injection for their tanks?

What advantage would that have given?

I guess that the fuel injection technology was not mature enough and probably sufficient manufacturing facilities didn't exist. Higher costs may also have played a part.



You can check the Wikipedia article for starters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_injection#Benefits

Yeah, well, 98% of the advantages are from electronic FI, which I'm pretty certain even the German ubermensch didn't have in 1943.

Mechanical injection advantages pretty much come down to the elimination of float bowls, which is important in something like an airplane, but if your tank flips 90 degrees from upright, I'd wager you have bigger problems than engine aspiration.

To be fair, float bowels cause a lot of headache with steep slopes, a reason why the Landrover used a modified Solex carb which could handle extended inclines up to 30° .

My bowels were floating earlier, but I spent 10 mins in the can and all's ok now.....

It will be riding high with no turret!!

Looks great, sounds great. Well done!

I've been in my dingo at a 50° angle and she kept on chugging. I was in the gunner seat with a buddy driving. We were down hill, on a slightly icy road and the rear decided to come loose going down hill. The rear skidded to the left and the driver, turned into the skid as was correct and the little car climbed the 6' embankment on our right to a nice sharp angle with the world at an odd tilt.

The driver powered through it and ran the right side wheels down the embankment and kept on going. The guys in the jeep behind us thought we were going upside down for sure.

Of course it was for just a moment. Still the engines were designed with remote sumps and specifically designed carburetors to handle sharp angles. Carburation is NOT the only area you need to be mindful of if the vehicle is going to be at very large and odd angles.

Ack, There's a photo sequence on YouTube showing the complexity of the installation of the transmission on the Panther.


Good grief that looks like a pain.

Oh my God, this Sexy sound. Harrr harrrr...
Respect for this work!!


____
Violent whirling with the arms of the many experts. That looks very very merry.
Hopefully the Panther does not have a daily on a railway truck...

Can we flip you through a quarter-circle and see if that still holds true?


Doesn't seem so bad, done under controlled conditions; not worse than moving furniture through constrictive spaces, anyway. Now in the field, with no cranes or jibs or time to do the job proper-like...


Shot

In the field, standing on the torsion bars, with mud as your main workshop floor, maybe a tarp spread between the trees over head, and a jib boom and a pair of chain fall hoists...yeah, changing that sucker would be just ducky.

I hope he does not mind my passing it, but Jacques related to me today that he was the driver:

Please pass on to him, that as one vintage Vehicle Owner to another, the restoration his staff perform are remarkable.

Tim the Tank nut is sure to be having nightmares now.

Anyway, a truly amazing piece of work, and full credit to the man (and his team) for achieving it. I wonder if they will ever do a sightseeing trip round europe?

Nah! Tim's tanks have the "Special" 37mm that was develpoed for "The Haunted Tank" that perforates mere Panthers like a tin can!!!

I know! I gunned for him! Wasn't paided a bonus, tho. Wasn't paided at all actually, but those pork steaks were good!

come on gentlemen, I know you all want to drive it, or am I the only one who does, or al least admit it.

Sometimes I forget just how big Panthers are...

I like this video. Its like a miniature M-256 120mm breech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKDqsZmWkW8&NR=1

You sure he was not directing the driver? It looked to me like it was Jacques standing in the turret ring in the video, no?

In any case, it is a great bit of video, and a credit to the Littlefields team.

-Mark 1

I believe I spy at least one Tanknetter (CG Erickson) participating in that pain. Looks like CG in the slouch hat at 10sec and 13sec on the slide show.

Just a guess, of course. Maybe with some luck we'll get a first hand account...

-Mark 1

I'd be afraid to drive it because of the fragility of the running gear. I'd hate to smoke a final drive.
There's no point in driving it if you aren't going to give it the works (once the break in period is safely over)
Also, Mike Green told me once that a Panther could do 45mph. I replied "on the back of a semi". Now we could see...
(given that our Stuarts top out at 41, 42, and 44 respectively, I just can't see a Panther getting over 30 mph)

Tim why don't you drop a couple of million bucks into rebuilding a panther then you can do what you want to with it.

By the way a German did just that with his panther and trashed his tranny.

Ahh guys... fuel injection (mechanical petrol) offers a wee bit more than just the elimination of fuel bowls, little things like accurate metering and correct fuel distribution across all the cylinders.

Carbies are an act of faith, relying on second order effects (engine vacuum, rates of flow etc) to dump approximately the right amount of fuel into start of a complex aerodynamic system in the hope that enough fuel comes out the other end in about the right amount in the right places and broken down into approximately the right sized droplets. Fuel injection, either port or direct, is a lot more accurate and a lot more predictable. A mate of mine does modeling software and one of his firm's projects is an intake manifold tool for the local branch of a Detroit 'Bankrupt Three' manufacturer, even with electronic port fuel injection, the mixture distribution across say a V8 is subject to a lot of variation with rpm and atmo-conditions, mostly due to air flow irregularities (normally over-rich due low pressure on certain cylinders). With a carbie, mixture distribution relays on air flow as the primary distribution medium, so low pressure also means lean mixture and thus all sorts of ugly things like hot running into detonation etc, and the only way around that is to run very rich (in a stoic sense) so as to insure even the leanest cylinder has enough fuel. Point 1 on why fuel injection brings better economy. Then we can get into stagnation and pooling, vaporization gradients and lots of lovely stuff.

It's all swings and roundabouts of course, and in a 40's context all very germanic in urber engineering etc. But there are benefits to be had, if the cost is acceptable - which nine times out of ten it is/wasn't. Take a step sideways and the old Blackburn Cirrus Major (the DeH Gypsy Major's obscure cousin and competitor) was a ~100-120 hp motor on carbs (IIRC), but 180hp with injection (post war AOP.9).

The roundabout is cost both to manufacture and maintain, back in the 40's mechanical fuel injection was some of the most tolerance critical manufacturing going on, both in terms of running tolerances and manufacturing tolerances. Still is for that matter, its why electronics have been such a godsend and diesels have historically been so expensive to buy per hp but are now about on par with spark ignition. It was a job for specialists, like Bosh and CAV, it also doesn't really matter what sort of engine an injection system was going into, cylinder per cylinder an aircraft engine, truck or tank motor, petrol or diesel, the industrial cost was about the same.

I've never seen it put into writing, but I'd suggest every fuel injected cylinder Germany put into a tank or truck, diesel or petrol, was one cylinder that would not be pushing an ME109/FW190/Ju88 etc etc, also some nth portion of a roller bearing output too, both fuel injection and ball/roller bearings production being closely related on the grinding side

Still, a great video!

shane

ed for dead space under sig

All my $$ is in restoring US armor. The Axis stuff is out of my budget.
Tell me about the German that smoked a trans. I hadn't heard about it yet. Was it a recent occurrence?

Munster Germany maybe? Five or ten years ago. IIRC it was the tranny but finals or the engine are much more likely. There are some YouTubes of it running but nothing recent.

There are a bunch of running panthers, the two new ones, Kubina, the French have one, and a bunch of 100% complete ones like the Canadians have sitting outdoors.

FI can be more accurate. Isn't automatically so, and almost guaranteed not so in 1944.

Mechanical FI is subject to all the same factors as carburetion - it even relies upon airflow for distribution, since it's batch-fire. Only one cylinder (or maybe pair of cylinders, depending upon configuration) is going to get its 'shot' at the right time...the rest will have the charge sitting atop the intake valve(s), waiting for opening. In your example above, how is FI going to compensate for low barometric pressure?

It's only EFI, and specifically SEFI, that solves pressure/density/et al issues.

Interesting method for evacuating the bore. I didn't know Panthers had bore-evacuation/-evacuators. Any idea how well it worked?



Shot

Probably not to good. Even if it did evacuate the bore fairly well, alot of fumes come out of the case while its laying on the floor, which that conveluted system does nothing for (because its not blowing and plugged with another round).

Typical German fixation on over complication. I wonder how many more guns or tanks they could have built with the man (slave) hours saved if they'd just kept the gun simple and installed a good turret blower to over-pressurize the entire fighting compartment...

The ejected shell falls through a set of trap doors and into a box that is connected by flexible hoses to the ventilation fan in the roof of the turret. There is an air compressor mounted to the turret basket that provides air for the air injection system on the main gun. The way the valve is constructed I think it only flows air during recoil as the breech is opening and the shell is on it's way to the trap-door topped box below. I have no idea how well all this worked, but it sure looks fancy.

I've also wondered about their ability to produce more vehicles if they had been kept simple (ex. T-34). I'm willing to bet a Panther has 6-8 times the number of parts that a Sherman does..... DAVE

Hehe, its got that in just its suspension alone...

Sorry mate but AFAIK no.

If there was a typical model for 40's mechanical fuel injection in a european context it was diesel practice, individual pumps for each cylinder or a pump and distributor. Indeed a lot of German examples in aircraft were direct injection - ie into the cylinder not the manifold. Even with batch firing the metering and distribution would still be more uniform. As for compensating, they did it the same way as with a high grade carb plus or minus a few tricks, baro capsules to measure manifold pressure, various forms of thermo-mechanical sensors to correct for density. Rolls Royce actually used a thermo couple to the exhaust manifold and regulated mixture by EGT, although that was for single point injection into the eye of the supercharger. EFI is just the latest and greatest stage of evolution, bringing techniques that date back to the 20's and 30's when people really started to get scientific about internal combustion into a more reliable and flexiable form that is cheaper to boot.

In any case FI is going to be more accurate in distribution even if its metering was as crude as you suggest, it is putting the juice right into the intake not counting on airflow to do the job, or for single point injection you still get more precise metering even if distribution is still less certain. Given the choice for a supercharged engine I'd go for single point anyway, the air pressure distribution is far more uniform than with an atmospheric induction system and you get better charge cooling and vaporization from a distant injector.

shane

I thought France had 3 running Panthers.
You are right about the youtube stuff. It's all old film clips posted recently.

Canadian Panthers sitting outside? Give me one and I'll see if I can get it running. If so, we'll go get it in the mud...

PS- We did have a final drive in one of the Stuarts fail some years back but it was because it had been damaged by running the sprocket into something real hard. Once a gear is chipped it's done.
The Stuart gear is larger than the Panther gear.

As to how well the panther's bore evacuator system worked, in battle the crews had to leave them off as the motors made too much noise in the intercom system due to crappy commutators on the DC motors.

So a Panther turret would sound like this: "Enemy tanks 800 merters, I see it, fire!, bang! barf, barf, barf, barf, up, left tank, I see it, fire!, bang! barf, barf, barf, barf, cease fire driver back up!" The gun propellent fumes would make the crew vomit but they needed the radio and intercom so bad that the fume evacuator stayed off.

No not kidding.

Not sure of the veracity of the info but I was watching the panther episode of "Tank Overhaul" c.2006 on monday night and they mentioned that there are only "five working panthers" in the world (Can't remember weather it was littlefield or the british collector) and that doesn't specify wheather that is including or excluding their two projects either.

May be five working Panthers in private hands, something I have heard Jacques Littlefield say, including this past October's TN visit. The Ft Knox Panther used to run, are there more at Munster, Koblenz, Saumur, etc?

Kubinka Panther used to run, before they kicked out all of the volunteers that were working on it. I don't know if it runs now.

Vladimir

Munster has a Panther and a Jagdpanther. Both are runners. Both however have diesel engines from Jagdpanzer Jaguar, I´m fairly sure.

Last I heard they were pulling the turret to get to the fuel pump which had gone tits up. This was several years ago when it was supposed to be at the Army in Atlanta museum for the US Army's birthday event.

Jacques' Panther is coming along nicely...it looks great (I was there for a visit last week).


Shot at 2009-01-02


Shot at 2009-01-02

Amazing what you can do with some milliput and a cut up credit card, isnt it?

Seriously, amazing bit of work. Maybe someone should give him Bovingtons Schmalturn to work on....

Never tried the credit-card trick.


Shot

Remembering the mess that tank was the first time I saw it, I think I would back Littlefield's crew against any restorers in the world.