An Effortpost on Tank Suspensions

[EnsignExpendable]

The mean goons over on SA roped me into writing an effortpost, so I figured it's only fair that you freeloaders get to enjoy it too.

 

So, suspensions. I'm going to introduce the book as well because it's probably the most Soviet book that ever existed. It is called TANK.

 

 

What makes this book so Soviet? Well, here's the first paragraph of the introduction:

 

"Under the guidance of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, our people built socialism, achieved a historical victory in the Great Patriotic War, and in launched an enormous campaign for the creation of a Communist society."

 

The next paragraph talks about the 19th Assembly of the CPSU, then a bit about how in the Soviet Union man no longer exploits man (now it's the other way around :haw:), then a little bit about the war again, then spends another three pages stroking the party's dick about production and growth. The word "tank" does not appear in the introduction.

 

The historical prelude section is written by someone who is a little closer to tanks and might be a little less politically reliable, since they actually give Tsarists credit for things. I guess they have to, since foreigners are only mentioned in this section when they are amazed by Russian progress. The next chapter is a Wikipedia-grade summary of various tank designs that gives WWI designs a pretty fair evaluation, then a huge section on Soviet tank development, then a tiny section on foreign tanks in WWII mostly consisting of listing all the mistakes their designers made. The party must have recuperated since the intro since we're in for another three pages of fellatio.

 

Having read so far, you might think that there is very little value in this sort of book, but then the writing style does a complete 180 and the rest of the book is 100% apolitical and mostly looks like this.

 

 

Which is what we care about, so let's begin. Bonus points to anyone who can identify what the diagram above is about. Sorry in advance if my terminology isn't 100% correct, there aren't exactly a lot of tank dictionaries lying around.

 

The book skips over primitive unsprung suspensions of WWI and starts off with describing the difference between independent suspensions and road-arm suspensions. In the former, every wheel is independently sprung. In the latter, two or more wheels are joined together by a spring. Some suspensions have a mix of these designs. For example, here's a simple road-arm suspension used in some Vickers designs and their derivatives. The two road wheels are connected by a spring and to the hull by a lever. A weight pushing down on top of the pair of wheels is going to compress the spring that's perpendicular to the ground, bringing the wheels closer together.

 

 

Here's a more complex road-arm suspension, with four wheels per unit instead of one, also AFAIK first used by Vickers and then migrating to an enormous amount of designs from there. This suspension provides springiness through a leaf spring that you can see above the four road wheels. The two pairs of wheels don't have their own springs. The black circles in the image show where the suspension elements can turn, keeping the tank flat while hugging the terrain.

 

 

Here's another road-arm suspension, similar to the first one. In this case, the spring is made of rubber instead of metal. Otherwise, the design is very similar. Two rubber bungs on the bottom of the axles prevent the wheels from slamming into each other too hard. This design was used by French tanks and nobody else.

 

 

For some reason, volute spring suspensions are completely absent from this section. This is the best image of a Vertical Volute Spring Suspension (early Shermans) that I could find. It's kind of similar to the first image, except the spring is a volute spring, and it's vertical instead of horizontal. Later Shermans used horizontal volute springs.

 

 

Of course, as the book points out, these suspension elements are very easy to damage externally and knocking out one part of the suspension will typically take out the rest of the assembly, so independent suspensions are the way to go. The best way to do this are torsion bars. The bar is attached to a lever that holds your road wheel. As pressure is applied to the road wheel, the bar subtly twists, remaining elastic enough to reset once the pressure is off. This image is kind of weird, but the part in the center is the part on the far left, zoomed in, showing you where the lever and the opposite side's torsion bar are attached. As you can see, road wheels in a torsion bar suspension are going to be a little off on one side, unlike what you're used to on cars and such.

 

 

Now, since torsion bars are metal bars on the floor, they are going to make your tank taller. If you want a tank that's as short as possible at the expense of width, you may want to consider a Christie like suspension. Here, much like in torsion bars, the pressure is transferred inside the tank, but instead of a bar to absorb it, it's a spring in a vertical (or angled) tube. In most tanks with this kind of suspension, the springs are on the inside, but if you want to make the tank roomier on the inside, you can have them on the outside too. If you're really fancy, you can put a spring within the spring like in this diagram.

 

 

Since this is a Soviet tank book, you gotta have a huge T-34 diagram. Here it is.

 

 

The T-34 uses Christie springs, which you can see in the diagram. The road wheel configuration is a mix of the externally dampened and internally dampened "Stalingrad type" road wheels. The former have more rubber for absorbing hits from terrain, but the latter use less rubber. When you're in Stalingrad and you have to make tanks with a rubber deficit, that's the kind you want. When road wheels from other factories were available, they would go in the front and then the back to absorb most of the impact from harsh terrain features, and the steel-rimmed wheels went in the middle. The diagram shows how both types of wheels work.

 

Rubber can't really take too much punishment, so the KV, being a heavy tank, went with internally dampened road wheels from the very beginning, with a ring of rubber on the inside around the axle.

 

 

And finally, idlers. If you don't have big Christie type wheels, you gotta have idlers so your saggy track doesn't fall off. This diagram shows the rubber coating on an idler, and also how the rear idler can adjust to tighten the track. A loose track makes more noise, gets worn more, and is liable to slip off.

 

 

Keep those tracks tight, and you'll be zooming towards glorious victory in no time flat!

 

 

Now, the book ends and my own stuff begins. I mentioned rubber, but not what a headache it was to tank designers. In hot weather, the rubber in your tracks and wheels tends to fall apart. If you go fast enough, tires that don't have proper ventilation are going to melt too. There was a lot of pre-war panic in the USSR about the German PzIII being able to do 70 kph on tracks, but once the Soviets started building SU-76Is on the PzIII chassis they found out that the speed had to be limited to a whopping 25 kph to keep the wear to a reasonable level.

[Tied]

Peter yes   can me and loosver please have a PDF/Scan of the full full book?

 

The nostaligia is real 

[Walter_Sobchak]

 

Warp speed!

 

 

 

[Walter_Sobchak]

Also, here is the earliest patent for a US volute spring style suspension that I know of.  

[EnsignExpendable]

Peter yes   can me and loosver please have a PDF/Scan of the full full book?

 

The nostaligia is real 

 

There's like a billion download links when you google the title + authors, pick whichever is your favourite.

[Tied]

Forgot how popular this was 

[Khand-e]

Is it true your personal tank uses a small supply of your gold in molten form as hydraulic fluid for it's suspension?

[renhanxue]

I'm pretty sure that in the torsion bar case the lever that connects the bar and the road wheel is called a "swing arm".

I might have to write something about hydraulic suspension now, for those special snowflake tanks.

[LoooSeR]

So, now we need to add what is left - hydraulic, hydropneumatic, and bizzare ones. Any good book on those suspensions?

 

I will add that Merkava's Christie-like suspension is eating a lot of space in the hull sides, that could have been used to mount armor modules, a-la Object 477 Molot, or Object 148/T-14. In the same time, this suspension allow to make hull bottom V-shaped (not much, but it is better than nothing).

[Collimatrix]

I'm pretty sure that in the torsion bar case the lever that connects the bar and the road wheel is called a "swing arm".

I might have to write something about hydraulic suspension now, for those special snowflake tanks.

 

Yes, the arm that the road wheels are mounted to is a swing arm.

 

This picture shows the relationship between the torsion bar, swing arm and road wheel pretty well:

 

 

In a lot of ways, the insane suspensions with lots of road wheels on levers with respect to each other are the interesting ones.  All modern, independent suspensions do basically the same thing with one spring per road wheel.  The only differences are if that spring is a torsion bar, a coil spring (either inside the hull in Christie, or outside in the T67/Merkava/E100), a stack of Belleville washers, or a volume of air being compressed by hydraulics.

[Walter_Sobchak]

Link to International Defense Review article from 1976 on tank suspensions.