JR wrote:

... Another wee quirk, it was fitted with 2 different sets of wheel studs and nuts! The rhs wheels used conventional threaded studs/nuts whereas the lhs used left hand threaded ones ...

JR wrote:

The B60 was also fitted to the Humber 'Pig' Armoured Car that saw a lot of use in N Ireland during the Troubles! There was also a a medium sized Humber truck that used the engine, the local garage ran one for years as their breakdown truck until they were no longer allowed to drive breakdown motors on Trade Plates! A mate and I bought it for £100, mechanically perfect, but the body was complete toast! It drove beautifully and the engine was so incredibly smoth!

The B80 was used in the Saladin Armoured Car, and in an Airport Tractor for the RAF. I think the Saracon also used the engine, but I'm not certain!

As for the Champ, I've had a couple over the years, the off road ride on these was completely unparalled with its fully independent and adjustable, torsion bar suspension! The downsides were very poor steering lock and suspension travel due to the complexity of the double wishbone suspension. It had rack & pinion steering, which is still not that common on 4x4's! Each end's suspension and drive unit was removeable as a single subframe unit, allowing reasonable repairs close to the Front Line, these subframes were then sent back to the larger MU's for full refurb work. The rear drive unit problem was mainly caused by the failure of a phosphur bronze bush on the imput shaft to the drive unit! If the driver hadn't noticed the problem soon enough, the whole casing would break off at the bush, rendering the unit scrap! I believe the bill to the War Office/MOD was £1.5million for that problem alone, and was one heck of a lot of money in the 50's & 60's!! I remember reading in a Motorsport magazine in the early 80's that someone campaigned a Champ in Trials in England-shire for some years; this guy had engineered a successful 'fix' for the rear bush problem by managing to machine just enough room on the already thin casing, to fit a very fine needle roller bearing in place of the troublesome bush!

The materials quality of these vehicles was incredible! You'd go to start to strip it and every bolt would undo as though it had only been fitted last year, not (when I played with mine) 35-40 years before! In order to try and keep the weight down a bit, diff, bellhousings and transmission castings were made from Magnesium! Another wee quirk, it was fitted with 2 different sets of wheel studs and nuts! The rhs wheels used conventional threaded studs/nuts whereas the lhs used left hand threaded ones, the idea being that as the wheels rotated to drive the motor forward, the rotation would tend to maintain their torque, whereas a conventional wheelnut on the lhs, if not at full torque, could tend to unthread itself; not exactly a good thing on the battlefield!!

Production ran to around 15,000 vehicles between 1950-56, and I believe they were used in Suez and Korea, my 2nd one was certainly ex Royal Artillery in Hong Kong! Less well known is that Austin produced a civvie version in small numbers! It was sold with a regular Austin 3Litre engine that was not waterproofed! And, whilst military versions were 24volt, the civvie ones were 12volt systems! I would imagine an original one of these would be the proverbial 'Holy Grail' of Champs, I'm not sure if any them survived! As it happens, I found some of my Champ literature a few months ago, and yesterday I came across a Parts Catalog from Champ Spares UK that had been sent to me in the late 80's!

Sorry for the length of this, I get a bit carried away when I start yacking about this stuff!!

It's a fascinating vehicle. Thanks for your insight