The Neverending Photo Thread

Da missus.

Rep is acting like a little bitch, so I can't put this in a rep comment, but I think that shot would be excellent if the person wasn't in the background.

That's not person, that's my wife!
And I agree, but I didn't think of it, and the flower's dead now.

Here's a couple more. The Aircraft Carrier USS Hornet, CVS-12, an Essex Class Carrier completed in 1943 and tied up at the now closed Alameda Naval Base, CA, and the USS Pampanito, SS-383, a Balao class diesel electric submarine also commissioned in 1943 at her berth on the Embarcadero, San Francisco circa 1999. An excellent trip!

The Hornet is definitely the best maintained and most complete Essex class carrier on display(with the exception of Intrepid,which I have yet to see). I remember when I was a kid, the Hornet being tied up in reserve at PSNS with her 3 sisters(Oriskany CV-34, Bonhomme Richard CVA-31 and Bennington CVS-20), that was a sight to see!

I'd be curious to see how the Hornet compares to the Lexington. The second ship is in pretty good shape considering that it served for twenty more years than the Hornet did.

When it comes to general material condition, I'd think Lexington would be in better shape. But Lexington is as she was at the end of her service in 1991, with all the associated "modern" electronics outfit, while Hornet looks as she did when she left service in 1970. If you've ever seen Yorktown CV-10, she looks like she was towed straight from the reserve fleet, dropped anchor and opened a couple of hatches. She has no radar, no weapons, no nothing! It's like Hornet had all her electronics stored on the hangar deck or something, she's incredibly complete. Besides, of the 4 Essex class carriers in storage on the west coast at the beginning of the '90's, Hornet looked to be in the best condition(it still had a paintjob!).

Who says you have to grow up?

A few shots from my Vancouver vacation. A Canadian RAM tank and an M4A3E8 Sherman tank outside the Armory downtown.




And a the view from the Capilano Suspension bridge. Amazing.

A few days ago I discovered a couple of rolls of undeveloped film in my camera bag. One of them is from a 2001 military vehicle rally/open house at a place near College Station, Texas.

There was a small contest for best-restoration. From what I understand, it's grown a lot since then.

WWII MB/GPW, postwar M38A1 and postwar M37 3/4 ton truck.



WWII MB/GPW (maybe postwar M38--I'm not that good with telling them apart from this angle).


M38A1


The following are all owned and were restored by the guy who owns the place.

M5A1




All of his restored vehicles are pretty complete.


On the inside, too.



M18 tank destroyer (with an M4 High Speed Tractor and M8 armored car in the background).



Neither the M5 nor the M18 have original tracks (they look to be from an M24), which was a little surprising. I didn't think that the drive sprocket on the M18 had the same pitch to accept a different track.

>EDITED< to add that it appears that the M18 has drive sprockets from an M24 or similar vehicle. M18 drive sprockets were very different looking and were designed for a single-pin track, not one with end connectors. I'm surprised I didn't notice the difference in person...



The guy who owns the place had several vehicles waiting to be restored.

Derelict M24


Engine compartment (two Cadillac V-8s go in there).


LVT(A)-4


That sucker is huge.


What was funny is that there were various parts of vehicles scattered all over the property. At one point, I tripped over the machine gun cupola from an M3 Medium tank that was lying in some tall grass.

105mm M68 (or M68A1) breech rings and breech blocks.

Took a camping trip earlier this week and snapped a few "nature" shots.










This part of the state has been going through a really bad drought. This stock tank/pond/lake is about 10 acres big, but is just about bone dry.



An old hunting decoy left high and dry.

Yeah, I don't know if the people at the photo place screwed up or if something was wrong with the film (it was exposed more than eight years ago).

Twenty-something years ago I remember getting some photos back from the developer that had a distinctly orange cast to them and I think it was caused by the cannister sitting in a car glove box for several weeks during the summer.

And then we have our old Agfa Film snapshots from the 80s, which have no cyan left in the prints at all....

Pretty sky tonight.
I got manual with this one. The auto exposure was staying open too long and washing out the sky, and it was too dark to see the controls. So when the timer opened the shutter I just stuck my hand in front of the lens after a second. A few tries got the right exposure.

Couple more even older photos. From a 1991 airshow in Houston.

I miss the old C-5 camouflage. The grey ones just don't look as cool.

Out of rep Dan, but pic #1 is

My photo really doesn't do it justice, but a couple of weeks ago we had the most amazing evening sky. It looked like it was on fire mixed with this weird purple.

So it looked more like this?

If anyone is interested, I've posted a number of stills over in my Blue Room thread. Starting here.

Apologies for some of the motion blur. VLC Media Player doesn't freeze motion as well as a conventional DVD player.

It does show off composition, though.

^How does on gain access to the "Blue Room"?

It's under "Group Memberships" in your User CP.

IIRC, a mod has to approve your membership.

Nope, no approval needed. You just select it in your userCP.

I didn't take this shot myself, but I find it to be beautiful. I would travel to Russia to see this! This is the Sverdlov Class Light Cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov, commissioned in 1954 and stricken in 1994. I asked an acquaintance of mine in Russia if she could be re-manned(Would be useful for showing the flag, so to speak!), since she appears to be in such excellent outward shape, but apparently the main engines are not in working order. What a beauty, one of the last true "modern"gun cruisers on earth(the Chilean Almirante Grau, USS Salem CA-139 and HMS Belfast being the others)!

Ok, I guess it's time to update this thread. My friends and I took a mini vacation to Kelowna BC. For those of you who don't know, Kelowna is located in the interior of British Columbia, and situated in between the major Canadian cities of Vancouver and Calgary.

People who take road trips generally stop off in this town to stay overnight if they don't want to drive for 12 to 14 hours straight.

What makes Kelowna unique, besides being beautiful, is it's located right beside Lake Okanagan, home of the mythical sea-creature Ogo-Pogo, which is the Canadian version of the Lockness Monster.

The lake itself is very deep, and I have been told it is impossible to explore properly, because the equipment they would need to do it weighs too much to be transported there by train or truck. So we may never know what truly lies beneath.

Forgive me for rambling. I'll start the pics then explain.

Various 011

This is a shot of Fortress Mountain on the way there. I chose to share this one because I liked the composition and how the sun seemed to give the mountain a golden glow that day, almost like the mountain was made out of solid gold.

Various012

This little rest stop on the way to Kelowna is called the 3-Valley Gap, and besides the little hotel overlooking a beautiful lake, it also has a ghost town beside it you can tour.

Various013

In this ghost town, they also have a classic cars showroom, as well as an old train showroom. The car showroom has about 10-15 classic cars, and the train showroom has about 5 trains that rich people used to ride in to get from one city to another.

Various014

This is one of the houses in the ghost town, done up with anitiques from that time period. I think this was a rich family's house, because they actually had fine things in it, and was the only two story house on display.

Various015

Flat mountains turn into rolling hills and high altitude farmland. This is a picture I took while riding shotgun down the highway. The ISO had to be high because we were moving fast, but I really like this picture.

Various016

Kelowna has great weather year round, and if you ever visit, you will probably strongly consider retiring there. Because of the great weather, it's a great location for growing grapes and all sorts of fruits. And with fruits, comes wine. This is the Mission Hill Estate Winery. The building that you see is a restaurant that overlooks the valley filled with vineyards and the Okanagan lake.

Various017

One of the last true arcades that I know about is at the Scandia Min Golf Course and Arcade located on the outer edge of Kelowna. I chose this picture because it reminds me of the arcades I always used to visit when I was a kid, and how the place seemed so magical. Too bad this particular arcade was filled with cheap games from the early 2000's.

Various018

Again, a shot out of a moving vehicle, with ISO settings on high and tinted windows (you can see the glare even.) but I somehow still really like this photo. As far as I know, it's only a little barn overlooking the lake.

Various019

This is my favorite picture I took on this trip. It's in the lounge/waiting area for a restaurant called the Summerhill Sunset Bistro. You are on a hill, overlooking a lake, and you can have yourself a drink and watch the sun set over the mountains. Remember the scene in Star Wars II when Anakin marries Padme at the end? Imagine that, and you'll kind of get the idea of what the place looks like. Kelowna is also known to grow a lot of mushrooms because of the dampness, so mushrooms are in a lot of dishes.

Various020

I had trouble deciding which photo to end the trip with, but I chose this one because it looked the best. There are many other photos that I want to show you guys, but I'll just keep it at ten or I'd be here all night.

That one rocks! Best one overall, IMHO.





It's a shame that this was a driving shot. It's nice but could've been so much cooler without the trash (telephone pole, wires, etc) cluttering the right side of the frame. If the barns were the elments furthest to the right of the frame, it probably would've looked really sweet.





Ditto for this one. Good considering that it was taken while on the move, but could've been really nice if you were out on the ground.



Very pretty. I'd consider fixing the tilted angle with Photoshop (it's noticeable, but not so extreme that a slight crop couldn't fix it), but otherwise very nice.

I stumbled across these photos that I took a few years ago (2005).

I was doing some consulting work at a small market station and, while out observing one of the reporter/photographer teams on an assigment, we drove past this sitting next to a rural farm road.




Since I had to pass within just a couple of miles of this place on my way home the next day, I decided to stop by and take some photos. There wasn't anyone around to ask permission of, but I starting shooting anyway.








I've never seen evidence of both sprocket types being used on an in-service M47...





...but it was obvious that this tank had spent some time as a hard target on a range.








The bore evacuator was dented and askew...



...damaged either on a range or by being roughly moved around by a recovery vehicle or some other means. All of the fenders had been stripped off...



...so clearly this old girl had seen some rough handling at some point.


The owner of the property eventually showed up and was cool with me taking photos. He told me he had bought the tank from "some place in Florida" some years back and had hoped to restore it himself, but had decided to sell it, instead. At the time I took these photos, he had already sold it to a museum in Colorado and was just waiting on them to come pick it up (when I was in that area a couple of years later, I drove by and the tank was gone).

How it got released to whoever he bought it from is something of a mystery to me, though. Judging from the rearrangement of the driver's position, it appears to be an ex-Bundeswehr M47. The Germans moved the driver's position to the right side of the hull (where the co-driver/bow gunner* sat in US M47s)...



...and filled the old driver's position with 34 additional 90mm ammo storage tubes (for a total of 105 rounds versus 71 in standard M47s).





What's weird about that, though, is that it's illegal to re-import US armored vehicles (thanks, BATF ) and has been for a number of years. While the then-owner didn't tell me exactly how long he'd owned the tank, the way he talked made it seem that he hadn't had it for all that long.

But it does seem to have been released by the US government, though, because it had clearly been de-milled.








In addition to the torch-cut breech, there were big cuts both inside...



...and outside the turret, as well as the hull. And someone (not the guy I talked with) had begun to cosmetically repair the cuts by welding up the gaps in the steel. In the second photo, you can see the rusty brown "puzzle pattern" in the glacis, where the welds have rusted.

I'm sure it'd be possible to trace at least part of the tank's history by tracing this serial number on the turret...



...but I don't know that it would shed any light on how it came to be sitting by the side of a road in rural Texas.


Anyway, I came across these photos on a bookshelf and thought I'd share them here. There are a few more (I took a couple of rolls of film that day), but they're mainly up-close "detail" types of shots.


I don't know if it was part of the de-milling process or whether they did it before they towed the old girl out to the range (the engine was also missing, which is typical for hard target prep), but the rangefinder would've run from this opening...



...across the turret roof to the hole on the other side.




Commander's position...



Normally there'd be a periscope/sight beneath that hood.


Loader's station.



90mm ready rounds were stowed upright on those rubber pads and held in place by those rectangular brackets. US tanks stored ready rounds this way until the M1 came along.

Looking forward from the commander's station towards the gunner's station.



This area was missing a lot of parts, but you can still see some of the hydraulics and the azimuth indicator (the flat, round object on the far right).





The really aggravating thing was that the guy who owned this tank took me in one of the barns seen in the background of some of these photos and showed me one of these:



But, by that point, I was out of film!

Unrestored, but complete (including the 20mm cannon and mount, though they'd both been demilled).

I've still got his number in case I win the lottery.





*The M47 was the last US tank with a 5-man crew.

More derelict tank madness...


I saw this M3A1 at Fort Sam Houston in the spring of 1990.





I had gone there to get a haircut and go to the clothing store when I saw this vehicle sitting in the motor pool of a maintenance unit. I found the most senior NCO who was there and got his permission to take photos.

From a distance, it looked to be neglected, but not too bad overall.






A closer inspection, though, revealed that it had spent quite a bit of time on a small arms range somewhere...







The "leeward" side of the tank...





Nearly 50 years old and the rubber on the bogie wheels wasn't in such great shape.


Given the small number of surviving M3-series tanks of all types, I thought that this might've been a diesel-engined version (used only for stateside training by the Army, though the Marines did use some in combat, IIRC). An inspection of the engine deck confirmed that it was a gasoline-powered tank (the exhaust outlets were different on the diesel-engined variants)...



Interestingly, there's a crate of "spare parts" in the background of this photo, including two complete sprocket assemblies as well as some bogie wheels.

Since it was exceedingly rare for combat tanks to have been "brought back" after the war, I'm very curious as to this tank's history.

Another interesting note is that this little tank (like the big M47 in my previous post) was missing both turret hatches. I wonder whether the Army removes them before towing the vehicles onto ranges?



Turret interior, with 37mm gun in the center of the photo...



Gunner's station...



The C-shaped object mounted to the box on the turret wall is the traverse control handle. Twisting it left or right rotated the turret accordingly. Gun elevation was done manually with the wheel with the handle on it near the bottom of the photo on the right. Above that you can see the empty sighting telescope mount (the "ring" above the elevation wheel).

Right side of the turret and gun...



M3-series light tanks only had a crew of four. The tank commander also served as the loader. In the background, you can see another "spare part": An extra trailing idler sitting on the hull floor.

Breech of the 37mm gun, M6...



The breech operating handle can be seen below (the T-shaped object), though it didn't operate. It appears that the breech had been welded shut in order to demil it and even the firing pin retaing plate (the slotted circular object in the middle of the breech block) has a weld bead around it.

For someone who had only seen 105mm gun breeches before this, that little breech was tiny. I wish I'd photographed my hand on it or something to show just how little the breech was.


37mm shell rack...



The tank carried 106 main gun rounds.


The turret traverse gearbox is seen here to the right and above the ammo rack from the previous photo...



The tubular object at the bottom of the frame is the drive shaft in its housing. Normally, you wouldn't be able to see it* because it would be covered up by the turret floor. This tank was missing most of its turret basket, though, (rusted away after nearly 50 years of exposure to the elements) so it's visible here. Some of the turret basket supports had survived, though, and are visible in some of the previous interior photos.


Close up of the turret gearbox...



Behind it, you can see the teeth of the turret ring and part of the 7-cylinder radial engine.


Driver's station...



The "spare part" trailing idler is visible in the foreground.


Co-driver/bow gunner's position...



The seats from both positions are missing as well as the steering laterals for the co-driver. The large object on the left side of the photo is the transmission (the drive shaft ran forward from the engine to here and the differential provided power to the drive sprockets).


A few months later, I went back to Fort Sam Houston, but the little tank was gone. Several years later, I saw that the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas (about an hour from San Antonio) had acquired an M3A1. It's a runner and, though I've never been able to ask any of the curators where it came from, part of me hopes that it's the tank that I photographed nearly 20 years ago.








*Early M3 tanks (no "A_" suffix) didn't have turret baskets and the turret crew had to step over the drive shaft when the turret traversed.

My doctor told me that was one of my problems!

The last B&W photo in post 118 - is that an M114? Our VFW had one in the 70s/80s that they used in the Memorial Day parade. When they first got it, the drive axle had been torch-cut and the engine fucked up to demil it. But when you've got a shitload of WWII, Korean and Nam vets on hand with multiple skill sets, the demil didn't last long. It was running under its own power very shortly after aquisition.