This Panzer 61 AA9 looks like it's straight from the rebuild depot, and, like the other vehicles with the RIA logo in the thumbnail, was available in their then-upcoming auction. Sales price: $149,500
An alternate method for determining armor thickness is to wait for a senior NCO to be sitting inside the vehicle, then using a hammer to hit the section of armor you are trying to measure. The actual measurement is determined by how long it takes for the angry non-com to pop out of the vehicle and start screaming at you. Naturally, the calibration is affected by a number of factors, including the NCO's general level of cafeination, time of day, what the nonsense lieutenant has been up to lately, whether a junior enlisted received a DUI the night before, and perhaps most importantly, the non-commissioned officer's "base hate level."
Little known fact. The main gun on this tank actually folds out into a giant sword, a battering ram, a wine barrel opener, and a pair of hedge clippers.
@@Electronick7714 Leather lasts long enough in most conditions, a leather thong is cheap and easy to replace (buy a boot lace, trim to length needed, save remainder). Leather can also literally last centuries in display conditions as long as it is kept oiled to preserve its integrity.
A number of Porsche designs including the Ferdinand/Elefant used horizontally mounted belleville washer suspension units. The proposed E-10/E-25 tank destroyers were to use the same system as on the Panzer 61. Presumably the Swiss studied the designs and decided to give it a try.
"I just fed the turret monster a bunch of batteries" Turret Monster: Om-Nom-Nom! Wait you want back? No can have, all offerings to turret monster final!
..and a place for the fondue bowl, rack & spirit burner; unless the crew prefer a raclette grill/griddle-plate...wh Although for the latter, I suppose there could be a adapter attatchment to one of the exhaust cover boxes made by a maintenance section - for part-cooking the rations.
that was found to be a fault, so on later models we fitted the gun so it could be folded back and instead you could fold out corkscrew, knife, saw, canopener, if needed. the toothpick and the pinzette were stowed on the fenders... The problem with this model was then that the gun was folded in at wrong moment, because you can't fight enemy's with toothpicks, since jörg sprave isn't swiss...
There's something to be said for universal military service, especially when designing domestically produced equipment. The guy designing it most likely has been the guy who had to use it.
Very well researched, thank you. Another peculiarity of this tank is the restricted width, which is only 3 meters, due to the insistence of an important parliamentarian of the then tank committee on the vehicle being able to use tertiary roads. This caused many problems later in the Pz 68, the tank being very cramped and having no development capability. There is a large collection of army vehicles in Burgdorf near the capital Berne in the collection of historical material of the Swiss Army, the Stiftung HAM. The collection is only open to the public in guided tours in groups, I am happen to be one of the guides. The collection consists of over 450 vehicles on display, including all the tanks the Swiss Army used, in addition to a host of M109 and M113. Plus trucks, light vehicles etc. etc. So when you happen to be in country I would be honored to show you the collection, filming can be arranged.
Hi Hunter, i do a similar role here in the UK as a volunteer at bovington and also take small groups to the Armys DCC center, would you be happy to do a small group from the UK?
Has HAM finaly fixed their problems (getting rid of a certain person) or is the future cooperation with the Bund still uncertain? I havent yet decided to donate but im within 200m of the main place in Thun.
@The_Chieftain The Panzer 68 suspension vertical travel for each wheel was 206 mm (bump) and 70 mm (rebound) for a total of 276 mm. The transmission of the Panzer 61 featured a sophisticated double-differential steering system with a hydrostatic steering drive (easy to drive)
At around 4 minutes when the Chieftan mentions the tracks were made of cast manganese, which didn’t make sense to me as you can see corrosion on the track links consistent with steel or iron. I’ve heard him before mention the composition of tracks before as manganese and say he didn’t know what it meant so I did a google search on cast manganese. It turns out the tracks are made of a steel alloy containing around 13% manganese called mangalloy or Hadfield steel which has priorities that makes it an ideal material for making tracks out of. Funny the rabbit holes you go into when you hear a weird piece of information in a video. 🙂
Manganese steel. The Tank museum RU-vid channel got it correct: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Sy-ZPUmit9w.htmlsi=-F1RFiUd4SQYFzGc&t=495
I missed the days of blessed youth gone by when there were regular expositions and the tanks and other vehicles became a quasi playground for children. For a long time Ive had forgotten the fun that was climbing around on armored vehicles. Then I got drafted as armorer and got to embrace these joys of the youth, jumping from deck to deck in the heights, as well as encountering the horrors of maintaining some of these sometimes neglected giants.
Nick getting tongue there a bit with his Pz 51's and stuff, but its not easy to do. the suspension is to keep the narrow profile. torsion bars can do this but have their own problems and are more hastle than their worth, Horstman types are good as they take up no internal space but you end up with a wider vehicle, this allows a best of both option with no internal space taken up but narrower profile to keep the doctrine of using Swiss tunnels. one final note is the armour should have a air pocket at the back end with diesel fuel cells in it, as they offer additional protection from SC attacks, this will effect ur ultrasound.
Just book a spot on a RoRo vehicle carrier ship and specify your port of disembarkation. Getting through Customs could have been a tad tricky given a certain 105 mm but it was accomplished somehow.
@@markfryer9880 $200 tax stamp as a destructive device plus paperwork requesting Curio & Relic Collectible status determination. Can't be an actual C&R, until after the DD tax registration gets approved and paid, but then C&R can be applied to grease import.
I was really curious about the belleville washer suspension. Apparently, the Germans (in WW2) were going to equip their ENTIRE E-series with it. I can see several pros to it (maintenance and a lower overall vehicle - than torsion bars, anyway). But so far, I cannot find a con. Must be some though.
Switzerland in the 1960ies had so many military bases and instalations all over the country, that maybe it was deemed extremely unlikely, that a tank crew would ever get into a situation, where they had to sleep on the tank?
You don't sleep on the tank, you sleep under the tank. (1) Protection from artillery while you're unconscious. (2) After cleaning track and pulling maintenance, not to mention ammo transfer, cannot lift arms high enough to climb up.
Always great to hear the Irish Shh as in Sh-tuff .. especially explaining the complex simplicity of the Swiss Army Knife idea - mounted on a tank. Make way there for Shlattery's Mounted Futtt .. Huzza (with an -ay sound, it seems not with an -ah; like Jose and a wee cuppa tea: Yeah! hurray!) It's OK, I'm daft - certified and all.
Track tension adjustment is automatic by means of a hydraulic system. Nothing needs to be done (nor undone :-) ). The suspension made for a very comfortable ride. You can easily figure out the full travel by the position of the end stops. The only problem was that you could shear off the bolts securing the suspension of the first road wheel to the hull, thereby loosing said wheel along with its suspension, if you hit a large solid obstacle at high speed. While the automatic tensioner kept the track firm on the tank and the loss of one wheel had no immediate impact on the mobility of the tank, it meant you had to go pick up the heavy piece of shit while your mates were chasing the birds in town, extract the remainders of the bolts from the hull and put the assembly back up. The ammunition port in the turret is not an ammunition port, it’s a case eject port. It is part of the casting and was there from the very beginning. It wasn’t present in the very similar looking predecessor, the Panzer 58, of which I don’t think there exist any outside the Swiss Panzermuseum. There is an ammunition port too, you can see it on the left side in the hull, just above the suspension of the third road wheel. The bowden-ish linkages connect the steering wheel, shiftlevers and pedals with the transmission, where all the shifting and steering happens. The common language of the Swiss military is swiss, german, french and italian.
Manganese is like perverted anime cartoons...it's manga-knees! Used in engine block and heads of VW Type 1....common as well in many aircooled 2 cycle engines as well(lawnmowers etc)
Yay, been waiting for that one. You just made me a realy happy panda, Chief! Even though I am swiss, I never heard of the unique suspension of this vehicle. I just assumed it was torsion bar. Teaches me to reley on assumptions... That strip of leather securing the latch is actually quite common in swiss military gear of that era, you see it everywhere. As to the language thing, well my dad served as a career officer before he retired, and afaik there is no official lingua franca. Officers are expected to speak at least two of the four offical languages plus english, and proficiency in aditional langages is very good for your career I would presume. My dad needed german, french, italian and english to do his job, with german being the most common, given that about 60% of the swiss population speaks german. English being needed for the whole NATO/PfP stuff, as well as probably serving as an inofficial lingua franca ("military english" is a part of the official curiculum in the swiss military).
As for languages, I got a letter from the Australian Government the other day and while English is our official language, it contained something like 14 other languages details and they are just the most common languages.
@Mark Fryer PfP Partnership for Peace, as Chieftain said, switzerland is a member. 14 languages being used in official correspondence? That sounds rather inconvenient. And here i thought my country has a problem with 4...
Somehow this one skipped my viewership till now. Cool little device you got there at the end to measure hull thickness. would like to know more about it. Also i hadn't heard the term Manganese in a while. I remember clearing out a warehouse full of that stuff a decade ago, Brings back memories.
Gotta hand it to the Swiss, they sure do know how to make a neat and tidy tank - I'm guessing their ergonomics will be top notch too, but we'll have to wait for part 2 to find out!
14:56 Holy shit you can just buy one of those to measure the armour of a tank...? Dear god, keep those things away from me or I'll start squatting in a tank museum, spending weeks on end going over every tank ; - ;
Chieftain, since you were over the engine deck at the time. I believe the recipient of your impromptu battery offering was indeed the "Hull-Monster", A distant but equally ravenous kin to the "Turret-Monster". Nothing like pulling a power-pack to get back your treasured articles. >_
interesting video - I guess the travel lock would be called in German "das Marschlager" - that is what we called the very part on a M109 - I assume they would also have designed in a Nespresso coffee machine if they would have existed already at the time ;-)
Yes, the Panzer 61! Right now, I am proud to be Swiss. A beautiful little tank. Unfortunately most of them are just standing somewhere in the rain and are nothing more than rustbuckets by now...
def recognise some of the lights and stuff.. you can commonly see them on swedish vehicles from the same era :P the searchlight on the turret is the headlight of a swedish PBV302 APC :P or atleast identical in apperance :P guess the swiss did take some advise and bought some parts from the swedish :P well.. in fact.. they allways have i think... dont know what we buy from the swiss though.. watches maybe? or maybe we get a discount on ski trips :D
You know what was weird to me? Hearing "CES" be called something other than "CES". (I'm referring to the "BII", aka the tools and other bits/pieces in the side bins)
That's the second time I've seen him step on the towing pintle. Of these days it's going to spin and the result won't be pleasant, and it surely won't be "easy enough."
Are there wandering around any ex-servicemen of Swiss Army tank corps, to explain how good ride this tank did give? I would like to hear about those Belleville washers, as from POV of servicemen.
@@venator5 no, but give you lot of training and practice in doing so; way more in comparison to the usual conscript. Maybe in part tow we learn about how to avoid this problem ... maybe not. See you next time.
I know I'm really late, but I think I can add my own two cents to the Belleville washer rarity. I was looking into the system in modern use and the basic problem is, from what I understand, is that it's a high friction system--each washer has a high surface area of contact both with the other washers and its retaining material, whether it be a containing cylinder or a shaft. Any amount of dust or abrasive, ie from the washers wearing, quickly wears down washers, and you can't just replace them or you'll get early failures of the replacement; you need to get rid of all the dust. This isn't a problem in machine or civilian use because these systems do not need to be airtight like tanks need to for NBC protection. The advantages then are just the compact nature, easy tuning, and cheap maintenance as far as normal life is concerned--it's just a few rings of metal. So, it's a high maintenance system in an area of the tank that is hard to get to in the field, in the military where crew maintenance is not always the highest priority. Leftover material causing early failure is also a problem of torsion bars or so you've said, but it's a lot easier to pull out fragments than trying to clear dust out of a tank suspension. On the tank itself: the fit and finish is lovely! At least physically, everything looks to be well crafted, at least if we exclude the infamous electrical problems.
That makes little sense as far as I understand the whole system. The bellevile washers are in essentially tubes bolted to the side of the hull. Wether they're airtight or not doesn't impact the interior of the tank being airtight or not, the whole system is situated outside the hull. This also makes the suspension actually pretty easy to maintain or repair in the field if they're designed with an eye towards it: Pull the roadwheel pair, unbolt the unit for that roadwheel pair, bolt a new one into its place and put the roadwheels back on. Apparrently the only notable problem with the system the Swiss experienced was that if the tank hit a solid object at significant speed, it could shear off the bolts securing the front-most unit, causing it and the roadwheel pair to fly off. This didn't immediately immobilsie the tank, but was a bit of a hassle to fix, especially in regard to getting the remaisn of the shorn-off bolts out of the side of the tank.
The high contact area applies only if the washers are piled in the same direction, i.e., convex to concave. If they are piled in series (alternately back-to-back and front-to-front) they are only in contact at the centres or the edges and the surface-to-surface movement is minimal: two concave surfaced pushing against each other expand ideally at the same rate. I've shot old 152mm Canet coastal guns with Belleville springs in the return mechanism. Admittedly the stack was quite a bit longer than in the tank springs, but the 7.5 tons of barrel and breech recoiled back and forth around a foot and a half in a split second, so the springs were very efficient indeed. The springs were not encased, but then rust was more of a problem in the coastal environment than dust.
Nicholas Dobos That also make the tank bit lighter and smaller and what would you do with that extra space anyway? Big box is a waste of space and material.
Could you find a way to make a video about the « char de de grenadier à roues 93 » known as the piranha ? Which I think is one of the finest Swiss armored vehicles...
My wife is from Switzerland and speaks German, French, Swiss, a little Italian and now English. Depending on where you live in Switzerland, the main language spoken will vary between German, French, Italian, the Swiss dialect of German and in a remote canton where her mother came from speak a form of Latin, known as Romish, I think that's how its spelled.
Because Switzerland is not a famous tank building nation. Same with Sweden. People think that these countries since they are neutral, don't make tanks.
