Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch: AEC Armoured Car, MkII, Pt 1 –  Hw

the associated equipment company was a British company founded about 1912 made quite a name for itself in the realm of building buses and trucks one of the more successful trucks that it made was the 4×4 Matador which entered British Army service mainly as an artillery tractor however in 1941 one of their designers had this brilliant idea of using the Matador chassis as the basis of what would effectively become a wheeled tank you see the Germans were wandering around in the deserts of North Africa with fairly heftily armed armored

cars so the British thought it might be a good idea to have something to counter it and so as a private Venture aec built the mark one armored car it was basically going to be a wheel tank it’s in fact the turret that they put on the thing was lifted straight off of Valentine they built somewhere around 120 of the things I remember he is alluding me at this moment it it it’s a thing that happens when you get more gray hair and yeah I know it it’s going to happen to you don’t laugh if it hasn’t already happened uh but anyway eventually they

moved on to the aec mark 2 now for the mark 2 they replaced the Valentine turret with a custombuilt one with a six pounder gun they presented these A’s to British Army British Army says fantastic we’ll buy them they didn’t actually end up using them all that much though uh we we’ll come back to the history towards the end but what you’re basically looking at is as close to a British tank in capability because remember at the time we’re still talking Cruisers like Crusader at best except on Wheels and it’s got a a diesel engine so

might actually be more reliable than the British tanks like Crusader so there there might be something to this anyway that’s the back story so as we look at the vehicle itself I mean firstly I I’ll just observe this is not ballistic this is simply a bit of shielding to stop knocks and bumps especially for the suspension components underneath so you don’t run the ground the armor values are interesting you go on the web and you what are the armor values of the AC mark one two or three and you get figures like 2 and 1/2

in sloped this ain’t 2 and 1/2 in SL we took a measuring tape to it because we were pretty sure this wasn’t 2 and 1/2 in slope the thickest armor plate seems to be this lower front hole here slightly angled and it comes out as about an inch and a quarter armor plates on the side you’re looking at an inch again angled slightly outwards uh it’s less than an inch maybe on the upper hole and the figures that you see online they’re not right so I just wanted to get that out of the way another thing you’ll see is that it’s a

combination of bolted and uh correction riveted no it was right the first time bolted and welded normally if you have something bolted it’s because you want to be able to remove components otherwise you go riveting no for some reason they just want bolts I don’t know maybe AC like bolts but why did they bolt and weld it I don’t know little splash guard here for the bullets to stop it ricocheting up there is a windshield very convenient uh because this thing will go along at a reasonable click uh reasonable clip

forgive me no officially it says like 60 kilm an hour in actuality it according to the drivers here it’ll go a little bit faster and then well that’s it you you get to your standard vehicle equipment you got Wing mirrors actually do work uh low VZ headlight couple of uh Towing mounts and well that’s pretty much a gist of it looking at the vehicle from the side it sort of demonstrates the I know we call it the brutalist approach to vehicle design it’s not the most elegant looking vehicle at all but that wasn’t really what they had in mind

when they designed it so obviously it is a little bit higher than your typical vehicle you got four very large Wheels one on each Corner as you might expect perhaps but there are some advantages so firstly you’ll see that the side of the hole expands outwards to the widest point at the turret ring before narrowing back that this was simply to allow for a larger turret remember the very original of these things were with a Valentine’s turret and now we have something looks a little bit more Crown wellish I guess perhaps it’s not but

this what kind of gives you the impression of the style of the time uh you can also see that it’s a combination of welded and bolted quick ask around nobody’s entirely giving me answer as to why this is the case escape hatch on the side now again this this is literally escaped the only noral way in and out of this vehicle is to climb up and get down in or if you’re the driver you get in the front hatch obviously a little inconvenient or perhaps dangerous if you’re knocked out in combat and you have to get out well you you drop this

and punch out but as you can see it’s not something you would ordinarily open from the outside uh but the other advantage of the angle of the armor coming out is that you do get a little bit greater armor Effectiveness because of you were basically sloping the angle just in the vertical instead of the horizontal aspect or would you say the horizontal instead of the vertical I guess it depends very much on your perspective large storage boxes anything in here worth opening some are easier to open than others okay just a tarp uh this one

looks like you have to undo some bolts to actually open them then you get to the suspension underneath now you’re looking at basic leaf spring suspension here but if you were to get down and have a look at the actual powertrain you’re going to see that the uh prop shaft which goes forward has ex exposed splines and my thinking behind this is that as the wheels are moving around you’re going to be altering the distance a little bit between the front axle and the transfer case so it’s going to try to extend or contract a little bit so those splines

should allow that little range of motion uh and it’s I’m not sure if it’s the the best answer to the solution but it does seem to work here the other thing to note is the steering system so the steering is applied to one wheel primarily so as you turn the wheel there’s a shaft that comes out and it turns this tie rod forwards and backwards and so think it’s a tie rod or we call it a push rod or a pull rod I don’t care what you call it I’m not a mechanical engineer comes through a pivot point at the front which then

applies another Force to A rod on the inside slightly to the to the front of this wheel which will then turn this wheel there is a another tie rod or cross Rod or whatever the heck you want to call it which goes from this wheel to the other wheel so as this wheel is pushed it then pulls or pulls the other wheel along with it now that part of it is actually not en unique to this vehicle you’ll see that in a few other things uh but uh outside of that you can see a little bit of protective covering for the universal joint in the middle

there and yeah that’s pretty much the whole side the turn well you can see the pistol Port we’ll probably come back to that in a little bit very vertical front facing the again the armor values on this thing the the figures that you find online they don’t seem to match at one what’s physically in front of me so I put the ruler up against this thing it comes out at about an inch and a half at best little bit of storage at the back and then you get to the engine pausing briefly at the wheels and you see that some of the nuts are a

little bit colorful why perhaps you may ask are some of them red and some of them not well it’s because some of them are reverse thread righty TIY Lefty locy does not necessarily apply especially in 1940s vehicles and particularly especially in 1940s British Vehicles so ordinarily you would find a lot of vehicles the wheelnuts on one side thread in the traditional Direction and the wheel nuts on the other side thread in the other direction the theory being that as the wheels go round and round the wheels on the armed car go around

doesn’t really work does it and uh they would either tighten or loosen if because the thread designs hav’t really advance of that point of course later on now you don’t care it’s the threads are always the same direction but in World War II uh that wasn’t necessarily the case so to identify which one was a reverse thread You’ painted now what I find interesting on this is that you have some reverse thread and some normal thread on the same wheel and if you look at the wheels on the other side they aren’t changed

around so you have the same outer ring or red on the left hand side as on this right hand side wheel whilst the inner ring of bolts is normal threaded on both sides I haven’t figured out quite why that should be the case I am sure someone in the audience is a little bit more automotiv inclined and can tell me exactly why they’ve done this but I thought it was still at least interesting enough to note at the back there’s a couple of interesting features to note firstly you’re going to see the beams which seem

to be the main support structure or frame of the vehicle think ordinarily the frame of a truck or whatever would be underneath and everything gets bolted on top not really the case here if you get down underneath and look up you’re going to see the the engine open to all there’s no obvious supporting beams there are a couple of cross beams that bolt into the side beams and they will also you’ll see the beams at the front as well so yeah no monoco here this is very very brutish other thing you’ll see the brakes for the wheels these are air

brakes so as the vehicle is driving along every 10 or 15 seconds you’re going to hear the pressure release of the air hissing out and that’s actually a good sign because if you’re driving along for more than 30 seconds or a minute you don’t hear the of the air brakes you know you have no brakes so you have a little bit of advanced warning to start figuring out where you’re going to crash again big leaf springs uh the engine underneath is the aec 195 now the earlier uh aec armored cars to Mark 1’s came out with the 190 this is 195 it’s

158 horsepower it is a diesel it is also a uh a motor found in buses if I recall correctly radiator at the back engine obviously under the two hatches that we’re we’re not going to turn the turret to open the hatches but that’s how you would do it uh couple of lights and you know I don’t see a towing Pendle this Hardward car can’t tow anything that’s it the left side of the vehicle is just as ugly as the right side of the vehicle I I’m sure that some mother would love this that’s not for me I do know if the little lifting eye up there should you

wish to pull the turret but other than that and the fire extinguisher on the fender there I think we’ll call it quits on the outside so in that case I will come back to you in a week or two and we’ll take a tour of the inside I’ll talk to you then this is not an ugly armored car so you’re the mother that likes it okay I I should say he was the lead restorer for this vehicle he might be biased

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.