AIR FILTERS |
Description |
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On the HL 230 engine, there is 2 big air filters/cleaners, on the earlier HL 210, 3 smallers ones were fitted as you can see here ,( the complete site is here , unfortunatly in German). | |
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Drawing of the air filter from the driver manual.The air filter is working with an oil bath, catching the dusts, old oil was used to fill the bottom of the filter (2 liters/filter). The filter had to be cleaned every 250Km on normal roads, on the dusty rods a cleaning was necessary every 50Km . | |
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Apparently these filters were painted in ivory, but red oxid primer is also visible at the bottom. | |
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View inside the filter, there is still oil inside ! | |
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Close view of the latch . | |
FAN DRIVE |
Description |
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The left fan unit, you can see the 2 ventilators and
the armoured cover, the parts "2" and "3" are prototypes parts for
tests and are not fitted in the production tigers.
On all the Tigers, these fans units are driven by shafts connected to a 2 speeds gearbox (2800 / 4000 RPM). On the early tigers fitted with HL 210, the small gearbox for the fans units is bolted on the rear armour plate, at this place, the fans units and the gearbox can be linked without problems by shafts, you can see here the shape of the gearbox on the early Tiger at Bovington. |
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On the tigers fitted with HL 230 engines, the gearbox for the fans is bolted on the engine (at the rear), consequently, the fans units and the gearbox are not on the same line and can't be linked directly, especially with all the tubes of the cooling circuit. To solve this problem, the German engineers added 2 transmission boxes on the engine side walls to transmit the power from the gearbox to the fans units, these boxes are only on the tigers1 with HL 230. |
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These boxes are filled with oil, used both for the transmission mechanism and the fans units, the little pipes on the boxes are to drive the oil to the fans units.These transmission boxes are actually the main problem to complete the restoration of the tiger1 at Bovington. As a matter of fact, their tiger is an early version originaly fitted with the HL 210 engine, this engine was lost (removed and used for tests). So, when they decided to restore the tiger, they took an engine coming from a Tiger 2 (HL 230P30), but of course they don't have these transmission boxes and all the other parts to upgrade the engine compartment. There was certainly instructions to upgrade tigers from HL 210 to HL 230, with all the modifications to do (parts added /removed), these kind of modifications were too complex for the crew and were done by the maintenance units. | |
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The funnels are to fill the boxes with oil (3
liters /box), and the little pipe coming out out of the filling tube
is to drive out the excess of oil . There is no
informations at all about these boxes in all the books I know, the only other
place you can see a drawing of it
is here.
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Here are some photos of an upgraded engine compartment. These photos are coming from a german report of 1944 about a modified tiger used to test an experimental heater for the cold weather. The cold was a big problem for the cooling circuit and the batteries. Additionnals ducts and electric devices are added or moved in this engine compartment; so don't use these pics if you want to build a production model. | |
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It's an early version tiger built with an HL 210 and then upgraded to HL230. Here we can see one of the modifications : a little door (red spot ) was added, this door is to access from the fighting compartment to the fuel pump fitted on the HL 230engine. Holes were cut in the engine side walls for the ducts of the experimental heater. | |
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Here you can see that the ventilation holes (red spots) for the HL 210 were welded. | |
