What is done with written-off equipment in the Russian army? They disassemble it, of course. Though sometimes it is bought by other countries.
Tanks T-62M1, for example.
Here we’ll show how they are loaded on railway platforms.
They take old, rusty tanks and some faultless equipment from other tanks and prepare them for paiting.
A tank is disassembled, cleaned, greased, painted from inside and outside.
Then the tank is sent for running in. Its gun is checked. 10 pails of water are filled up into the burrel and it is plugged with a log. Boom! The recoil is OK! It looks like a real shot.
This is how ready tanks look like. Before the departure all attached implements are disassembled and the barrel is turned backwards. All accessories and spares are put into cases. One case may weigh up to 700 kg. So 15 men are required to load it.
Safety measures instructions
The first is coming on the platform. The operator is helped to place the machine. The tank is not much different from a tractor.
Men with instruments are coming
Grip hooks are attached to the tracks to make the tank immovable.
Overhang of the tank is measured with a ruler! Up to a millimetre!
Fixing antirecoil devices
And with staples
They cover the gun with some layers of wire and tie it to the cross arms on the car.
Then conscript soldiers (only them) twirl the wire with a crow making tension.
The position of the machine on the car is disguised with paint.
Marking of gravity centre
In the cabin wires are turned off from the switch. Everything is covered and sealed.
Meanwhile remains of fuel are poured out and new 10 litres of fuel are filled in.
By the way, it is not easy to pour the fuel out. You have to lie under the tank and turn off a hatch. There is a secret hole under it in which you have to twist in a connecting pipe that lifts a locking ball up and the fuel starts to pour out. You are lucky if there is such a ball…
All the hatches are closed and sealed
Being unloaded in the port
And lifted high by a crane
“Bald” tanks weighs about 35 tons.
Then they put the tank on the vessel that will take it to a necessary country.
Cool. Rather than sell the old tanks, sell them to countries that don’t need modern tanks.
Such as Iceland or Fiji.
Iceland doesn’t even have armed forces
Neither of those nations have need for tanks buying them would be a waste of time heck those two nations basically do not even have armed forces beyond arbitrary defensive units and Fiji has at best police.
I bet many of those tanks go to the US and western Europe and get purchased by wealthy guys that collect them there are several privately owned T-62s and T-54/55s in the US.I bet they get more money form that kind of sale than they do selling them to a third world nation at least per unit anyway they probably sell 4 or 5 at a time then.But the market value of a tank to a collector is very high.Just like ht AK-47 in the US a true military grade fully automatic AK-47 goes for nearly $10,000.00 and that is a very used one in Africa or Pakistan that same AK might cost $50 dollars.
Full auto AK-47′s cost so much in the U.S. due to artificial scarcity created by import/export bans. Otherwise they would be just as cheap as Africa.
Supply and demand. More and more of what we want is outlawed. So the price goes higher. Collectors are going to have to hide these from the government. Otherwise, they will be scrapped, outlawed. I wish we could be free to own anything we liked. Even old military trucks are getting to be hard to register. Too many regulations
Cool post!
From where? My uncle has a pretty good size collection of old military vehicles(nothing like what a wealthy guy would have but still) in the US as long as the cannon or anything similar is rendered no functional you can have it and that kind of makes sense really.Actually the regulations are fairly limited in the US.
It makes sense that fully automatic weapons are hard to get you can defend yourself just fine with any semi auto rifle.
every *big boy* would be happy about a tank!! ^^