The Humber Mk IV...

[rmgill]

So, as some of you may know, about 7 years ago myself and two friends jumped into an armored car restoration project. A dealer in the UK, Chris Wilkinson, who has now passed away, had a small set of about 6 Ex Portugues-Ex-British Army Humber Mk IV armoured cars. WE bought the last one for $6,000 US. This is what it looked like when we bought it. The car had a lot of problems. Parts were missing, the main gun was gone, no mantlets (inner or outer), the engine block was cracked, and there was a lot of corrosion on the outside sheet metal. The Interior was similarly manky.

Here's looking up at the turret rear

Turret Roof

And forward towards the Driver's Compartment.

Jim Burrill, the main partner in this project took these photos in about 2004 during a visit with his wife. Time passed and we put the money down on the vehicle and had it shipped to Hughes Fabrication. Clive Hughes is the last Humber Guy in the UK with Military parts. He in fact had another MK IV to work on at the same time and this helped because both vehicles needed new external sheet metal to be fabbed. Clive had other projects and we were fine with having the project back-burnered from time to time in exchange for a lower shop rate.


Clive and his chaps pulled the turret off. Then pulled the hull off. All the interior bits were stowed in triwalls and set aside. The engine had a new block sourced, a replacement radiator adapted (the original radiators were too far gone to repair and are not to be found). The transmission, transfer box, and axles all got a going over and moderate rebuilds to seals and affected parts. The frame was sand blasted, brakes rebuilt and all manner of mechanical components rebuilt or replaced. This netted us a rolling chassis with a sandblasted hull and turret (outside) and a pile of rusty stowage bins, a non functional dash and a bunch of other parts to locate.

This process took about 5 years and the car finally was ready to be stuffed in a container and shipped to us in the US. It was shipped to Port of Baltimore and several of our WWII re-enacting group was at Alan Cor's place to help with the unpacking from the container. Jim's photo array is at this url.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RV0uA0pqZI

 

[rmgill]

As stated above, we had three triwalls full of parts.
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A clean exterior with new fenders, stowage bins and good mechanicals.

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But No dash. No Electrical control system. And no wiring aside from the basics to start the engine and move it around.

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The inside of the hull had been blasted, primed and painted silver, the floor plates green and some other parts left as they were (like the drivers seat).

The Turret was still rusty and had not been dealt with at all. We had a bunch of wiring to remove and recover and figured it'd be more fiscally wise to do this ourselves.

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We had piles of parts:
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Some old and original like these parts of the turret basket and coax ammo stowage bins.
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Some re-produced from patterns because they were entirely missing from our vehicle.
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I guess around summer of 2009 we got all the parts and vehicle moved to Jim's place in Pennsylvania. There he began to work on the car, when he didn't have a dreaded "honey do!". I would spend time going up there to work on it. When I had free time from work, I'd go up and work on the car. In 2010 we stopped work on the Humber to work on a project for a friend, a Daimler Dingo that'd sat for a long time. This allowed us to exchange our time and labor for a bunch of needed parts, a 37mm gun barrel!


It had a dodgy charging system, shorts in the dash panel, a bad fuel system, brakes full of sludge, a holy radiator, and numerous other small problems.

We took our friend's dingo from this:
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Jim did all the needle scaling, detail paint work, sewed a new set of leather and canvas, and mended the electrical system. He also did all of the re-assembly after I left. I spent 2 weeks up there working from 10am to 1-2 am in february in PA. It was needless to say a bit cold. I worked on the brakes, the charging system and of course helped did the tear down of the fuel system, the coolant system and we both worked on a lot of other small stuff.

Here's what the master cylinder looked like

Replacement seals and hoses from the UK allowed us to put the brake system back to full function.

 

[rmgill]

The March of 2011 saw us with the new partner in the project (Randy), who took over from the third partner (Don). We were thinking we could get the car ready for FIG2 in 2011 but when we got rolling we realized it was going to be too big a deal. So we pushed on through 2 weeks of work and pipelined as much of the blasting, priming and painting process as we could.

At this point Jim had already cleaned/primed/painted the interior. It was a nice enamel white (correct wartime interior color for British AFVs).





The fuel tanks had been dealt with at the same time as the Dingo above had been. Jim had installed these after much puzzling as to how to get them in. In the end it meant all the rear armor had to come off, along with the engine deck/hatch and the generator, then they could be slid into place.







Still to be done was a lot of wiring. Fixing the turret hatch hinges and torsion bar. Resolving the coolant temp gauge sender plug and many other things. While I was wiring,


Randy was painting.



I spent 2 days straight sitting in the driver's seat working on the wiring just for the dash and charging control panel.

We got all the wiring done for the whole car, the gigantic shocks installed and filled, copper piping for fuel installed, and many other smaller things.


We left with a lot of things still to be done. There was still a lot of sheet metal to be fabbed for things that were still missing in the turret and a number of other bits. But we were able to crank it up and drive it out into the yard under it's own power and with out any issues.