From: mr.bones (mrbonesblues@sbcglobal.net)
Date: Tue Feb 07 2006 - 17:23:10 PST
During my time in the Seabees, we had many, many of these, in the personnel
carrier and contact maintenance configurations. They were universally
referred as 'weps' or 'weaps', probably cause they replaced the dear ol
weapons carriers made by Dodge. Hope this helps in some way.
I do recall they were fine trucks and would climb anything including a tree
if you could get the tires ahold of it, even when being asked to do things
far in excess of their mfr ratings or design. They never presented a
maintenance / reliability issue for us that exceeded any other vehicle in
our TOA, despite their often being subject to 24/7 use even in peacetime to
accomplish our tasking and mission.
While I would be the first to concur that their OHC 6 is, in my opinion as a
mechanic, best relegated to preventing the drift of medium-sized watercraft
away from the desired stationary aquatic coordinates until retracted and
stowed, we had some good mechanics. They had to be; all of our MVs were hand
me down / DRMSd from other branches of the DOD that actually had operating
budgets. Seabees Can Do! All of our equipment had to work every day;
failure was simply not an option, nor was replacement vehicles.
P.S. Especially fond of the memory of driving one daily from NAS1 Sigonella
to NAS 2 on the Sicilian Autostrade, NDTs hanging off the right shoulder as
rush-hour traffic flew by us at hyperlight speed des[ite my right foot being
on the floorboard the entire trip. We had to pull the operator side mirror
arms up and in to prevent them from being repeatedly struck and shattered.
We had some names for them on those trips, but due to the decorum of this
list, I will not utter them here. I do remember most of our trucks ,
especially on the roadways, fell into the same nickname category as the
C130s we frequently flew on worldwide: "Swineus Subsonicus Maximus", Big
Slow Pig. Likely not proper Latin, but guaranteed proper Seabee vernacular.
My best regards to you and yours,
T. Bones Morris
Heah everyone
I got the fly wheel of just required force
(wd-40) thanks for the help
ALEX,WASHINGTON
P.S. Was there ever a "name" for the m715?
M274-MULE
M135-EAGER BEAVER
M29-WEASEL ETC.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Jul 18 2006 - 21:40:38 PDT