Good day, can anyone please kindly tell me what is this part (boxed in red) ? Should it be really there? Should it still be present if the tank’s blast door have the 6 circles (3 on each door) on top of them? Or it’s only present if the 6 circles on top of the blast doors are absent? Thanks!
Photo:
That is present on all Abrams tanks. It is the lock down for the loader’s hatch when the hatch is opened. The loader’s hatch has two positions, fully closed and fully opened. For some reason, modelers like to display the loader’s hatch in various angles. The hatch is about as heavy as a manhole cover. You don’t want that thing bouncing up and down; it would smack you on the head and give you a concussion or slam shut and cut your fingers off.
Those six circles are part of a never used (and eventually abandoned) quick ammo replacing system. Instead of manually loading 50-some odd tank rounds through the loader’s hatch, the crew could just hook up the complete removable ammo rack with a crane and replace it with a full rack. We called the rings “anti-sleeping bag mines” since that used to be a prime spot to sleep at night, but the rings made it not so.
Rob, excellent info AGAIN! Thanks for sharing and have a nice day!
Paweł
Hi Rob, thanks for the info and thanks for mentioning that those 6 circles were never used. I already used them though hehe! I’ll just remove them. Still got more time to correct errors. Thank you very much! Back to my build now. : )
You can leave the circles there. Some tanks have them, some don’t, some have the spots in the no slip texture but don’t have them.
Nice. Then I’ll just leave them because I realized I applied too much cement on them : ( I checked on some other photos as well and yup, some still have them. This is the very first time that I went too close with an M1 and it surprised me that there are a lot of variations in small details. Just running some final checkup now before I put everything up, primed it then paint it. Thanks a lot Rob. : )