Fun fact is that I did a spectral analysis on some tiger steel too and I was suprised to find sulfur in it. Sulfur makes steel brittel and you dont want that. But there was no phosporus... And that is wierd because the proces of removing phosporus is the same that removes sulfur. Which means they purpesfully added that back into the mix. I was puzzles.... until I saw those pictures of the production lines where they have dozens and dozens of drills that drill the hull simultaniously. And then it hit me! THEY ADDED SULFUR SO THE METAL SHAVINGS BREAK VERY SHORT AND DONT TANGLE UP THE MASCHINES!!! They do that today in modern CNC Steels for the same Purpose. That blew my mind!
So they made the armour brittle to ease the manufacture process? I suppose there is always trade off when building tanks especially in war time between ease of manufacture and making the best possible equipment.
I suspect the sulfer content had more to do with weldability than with chip vs long stringy drilling debris. As a machinist, I find tool speed and coolant levels more pertinent to chip production. But if sulfer content is too low, weld penetration tends to be poor. Also, due to tungsten shortages later in the war, the Germans were forced to use steel tooling rather than “wediastahl” tungsten carbide tooling. Even annealed armor plate is tough on high speed steel tooling. A little sulfur in the mix, about .005% or a bit less, would make it easier to machine regardless of chip type. Though you are right. Yes, When you are drilling, especially thick steel, you would rather have chips than strands.
The weakness of German welds under shock loading is amply demonstrated in your (Armored Archives) YT video “Tiger II v HESH.” My understanding is thin armor plates can be made very tough and very hard. These are typically of 6 to 10 mm thick where heat can be transferred into or out of the depth of the plate. One if the USA halftracks was able to substitute 6.35 mm (1/4”) really hard but tough armor for 9.5 mm (3/8”) plate; however, the 6.35 mm plate could not be welded. At one time the Brits classified vehicle armor as “high hardness” HH) and machinable quality (MQ). Good armor piercing caps combined with tough bodied projectiles are the bane of face hardened armor. The cap can induce shatter in the armor with cracks spreading throughout. The cap shatters but a tough (blunt) projectile point survives. I’ve seen cross sections of US Army & USN WW II APC with the main projectile having a very rounded nose; the windscreen (ballistic cap or hood) is pointy and provides the ballistic low-drag coefficient.
Nice video. The material science aspect of tank armour is often overlooked. Not all armour is equal as the people responsible for Chobham-Dorchester will tell anyone who will listen. Getting it just right can be a bit of a challenge OR a big part of a Challenger! Sorry, couldn't resist.
Pz 38(t) and Pz III were overhardened because it protected the tank from low caliber ammunition. A 30mm plate can easily penetrated by a 20mm AP round at normal impact but not when treated to a high hardness. It decreases the effectiveness against larger calibers but that just means it will get penetrated at greater ranges. So it's really more of a trade-off.
Yes. British tests concluded it was 13% stronger than the best allied tank steel, particularly the front plates with their 265 Brinell Hardness. Even the 80mm side plates were the effective equivalent of 90mm plus of the best allied tank steel.
@@lyndoncmp5751 There's no such thing as "best armor". Also, hardness is not a test of strength. It is extremely easy to produce high hardness steel. In fact, taking the hardness (due to high % carbon) OUT of steel and therefore increasing it's toughness, is the hard part. If either of you watched the video, it should have been obvious that materials science is not as straight forward as strong vs. weak or best vs worst armor. Improving in one category, e.g. hardness, inevitably makes your steel more brittle and prone to cracking. Similarly, using a more ductile steel, generally makes the material tougher and able to better withstand impact, but makes it easier to penetrate, warp and bend under stress. And this is just a single consideration. There are also many other considerations like weld strength, machinability, ANGLE OF IMPACT, time and resource cost to manufacture, etc., etc..
@@mcs699 Of course there is better armour and worse armour. Armour quality varied. The Tiger I's nickel steel of 265 Brinell Hardness on 100mm thick plates was concluded by British testing on Tigers in Tunisia to be 13% stronger and more shell resistant than the best allied steel of the same thickness. The British actually tried to emulate this for their Tortoise project. Source : Thomas L Jentz, Germanys Tiger Tanks. Write your own book with primary sources refuting it if you wish. The world is your oyster son.
When this person writes stronger, I think it is a reference to actual firing trials, using guns against captured armor, including whole tanks or the wrecks thereof. So it’s probably pretty accurate. The Tiger’s armor did get a bit spotty later in the war though. Soviet trials found the armor of the King Tiger more prone to cracking than the earlier armor of the Tiger 1. As mentioned above, alloying elements, time to do things right and skilled labor were all lacking.
Another issue with manganese is that manganese steel is air-hardening, necessitating the use of an annealing oven to control that aspect. After WW2 the Japanese steel mills were throwing railway rails into the melting pot without consideration of the likely consequences. This may have been a result of experienced men being lost during the war. The problem was discovered here in Wellington, New Zealand, just down the hill from where I live, at the old William Cable facility on the Hutt Road, opposite Ngaio Gorge. The front half is now a car park and the rear half is essentially a drapery cum craft shop. A large steel beam-made in Japan-was lying on its side, intended for use in a standard NZ Railways ‘plate girder’ bridge. Some of the men sat on it to have their lunch and the works prankster decided to have some fun with them. He grabbed a ‘tripping hammer’ which was used to undo bolts on a ship’s engine cylinders and hit the beam in the centre of the web. The beam split down the middle, as witnessed by my now deceased friend who was an apprentice at the time. The subsequent investigation revealed the aforementioned deficiencies at the Japanese steel mill and probably saved quite a few lives around the world.
If you study the German side.....The German economy suffered very much from a shortage of steel alloy metals. It was in a lesser extent the tank type as P IV, Sturmgeschütz, Panther, Tiger rather than the availability of alloys. There might be a dfference in Czech that built the Marder, later 38T Hetzer as they had their own iron ore, steel manufacturing. I do not know. In the first years of the war the German armor had a high content of chromium, some nickel, manganese. The steel was air hardened. The alloy quantity was reduced especially the nickel. The steel became oil hardened. In 44/45 the armor plating steel was made with very low alloy content. It was water hardened. This steel did show cracks in some cases after the impact as shown in the video.
From what I know about how industry was being run by the party, there were layers and layers of people who didn't know what they were doing added to every enterprise to insure political reliability. It would be interesting to see if the papers were still in existence about how the choice to use brittle metal was decided.
Germany produced high quality AP rounds. So it's unlikely that they were lacking behind in metallurgy. It's just some different approach. Each plate was designed to to offer high protection for the lowest weight, against the caliber it was supposed to protect against. If you shoot a Panthers side armor with a 75mm, it will crack and spall. But it also was not designed to resist such calibers. Every other medium tank in WW2 is easily penetrated from 75mm shells from the side. Even the anemic German 37mm could penetrate a Sherman side armor from 200-300m at normal impact. Almost every decision by the German Army in WW2 is based on maximium effecency for a certain criteria. This however often lead to side effects that basically negated any of the positive gains. The German mindset would want a weapon that is 120% as effective as the enemies, without considering that it will be only 80% effective in other scenarios.
We do know that as the war came to less than a year before the end, Germany had problems keeping up the quality of their armor as some of the alloying ingredients were becoming more difficult to obtain. It’s always interesting to see people insist that the Germans had the best technology during the war. Some of it was excellent, to be sure, but some of it was dreadful.
The whole purpose of german superweapons was to keep the engineers from getting drafted and to earn the board members and shareholders enough money to live comfortably post war.
Running low on resources does not mean they had bad tech. Their tech except in radar was very advanced and we still use improvements of their designs today like Infrared optics, manpad shoulder rockets, heat warhead panzerfaust (rpg7) And tons more I can’t think of off the top of my head. Modern Jets also followed the German over the British turbine design
A review of Japanese armour would be interesting as well, as Japan has always had poor quality steel. That's why they had to fold their sword metal 1000 times since the steel quality was so bad.
Japanese swordmaking is rather irrelevant to modern Japanese steelmaking. Old-fashioned bloomery smelting _does_ produce iron with a great deal of slag inclusions from Japanese ores, but that was no longer the case once Japan adopted modern blast furnaces and decarburisation. Not to mention that a great deal of Japanese steelmaking during the imperial period took place in Manchuria with better continental ores.
I'd heard of the 38(t) having brittle armour, and I've wondered if that was also a problem with the TNHP sold to other countries, or whether it only applied to the tanks built for the Germans?
It's all well and good up until about 1944 when the quality of German steel dropped dramatically. Then they were using whatever they could get their hands on.
Jeez?...That hull gunner position in the early D's eh?.....-Whos bright idea was that anyways? I can just hear the PanzerTruppenschule lehr training officer speaking to the rather perplexed, chin scratching n' nervous future funker: "Yeah, ya just OPEN up the rather large HOLE in the GLACIS, stick yer banger outtve it, bang away till your done, that, or the HOLE & the enemy will bang away @ you until its DONE with YOU. Pretty simple-ish really, youll get the hang of it"
Conclusions are based on unknown testing methodology and conditions of armour when evaluated. There is a biased tone rather than an objection one; recycled propaganda. 🤔 😀
Enough German combat records and destroyed German tanks examined in after action reports tend to show that this is a pretty accurate review of German armour quality.
Fun fact is that I did a spectral analysis on some tiger steel too and I was suprised to find sulfur in it. Sulfur makes steel brittel and you dont want that. But there was no phosporus... And that is wierd because the proces of removing phosporus is the same that removes sulfur. Which means they purpesfully added that back into the mix. I was puzzles.... until I saw those pictures of the production lines where they have dozens and dozens of drills that drill the hull simultaniously. And then it hit me! THEY ADDED SULFUR SO THE METAL SHAVINGS BREAK VERY SHORT AND DONT TANGLE UP THE MASCHINES!!! They do that today in modern CNC Steels for the same Purpose. That blew my mind!
So they made the armour brittle to ease the manufacture process?
I suppose there is always trade off when building tanks especially in war time between ease of manufacture and making the best possible equipment.
I suspect the sulfer content had more to do with weldability than with chip vs long stringy drilling debris. As a machinist, I find tool speed and coolant levels more pertinent to chip production. But if sulfer content is too low, weld penetration tends to be poor. Also, due to tungsten shortages later in the war, the Germans were forced to use steel tooling rather than “wediastahl” tungsten carbide tooling. Even annealed armor plate is tough on high speed steel tooling. A little sulfur in the mix, about .005% or a bit less, would make it easier to machine regardless of chip type. Though you are right. Yes, When you are drilling, especially thick steel, you would rather have chips than strands.
nice to see the Weald Foundation re-playing your videos, Ed!
Thank you to Ed for allowing us to repost them.
why did Ed give up on his channel?
The weakness of German welds under shock loading is amply demonstrated in your (Armored Archives) YT video “Tiger II v HESH.”
My understanding is thin armor plates can be made very tough and very hard. These are typically of 6 to 10 mm thick where heat can be transferred into or out of the depth of the plate. One if the USA halftracks was able to substitute 6.35 mm (1/4”) really hard but tough armor for 9.5 mm (3/8”) plate; however, the 6.35 mm plate could not be welded.
At one time the Brits classified vehicle armor as “high hardness” HH) and machinable quality (MQ).
Good armor piercing caps combined with tough bodied projectiles are the bane of face hardened armor. The cap can induce shatter in the armor with cracks spreading throughout. The cap shatters but a tough (blunt) projectile point survives. I’ve seen cross sections of US Army & USN WW II APC with the main projectile having a very rounded nose; the windscreen (ballistic cap or hood) is pointy and provides the ballistic low-drag coefficient.
Nice video. The material science aspect of tank armour is often overlooked. Not all armour is equal as the people responsible for Chobham-Dorchester will tell anyone who will listen. Getting it just right can be a bit of a challenge OR a big part of a Challenger!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Give us more please. A very high value watch.
Pz 38(t) and Pz III were overhardened because it protected the tank from low caliber ammunition.
A 30mm plate can easily penetrated by a 20mm AP round at normal impact but not when treated to a high hardness.
It decreases the effectiveness against larger calibers but that just means it will get penetrated at greater ranges.
So it's really more of a trade-off.
I've read that the best armour on any tank during WW2 was the Tiger, high nickle content I think was the reason for the right hardness-strength ratio.
Yes. British tests concluded it was 13% stronger than the best allied tank steel, particularly the front plates with their 265 Brinell Hardness.
Even the 80mm side plates were the effective equivalent of 90mm plus of the best allied tank steel.
@@lyndoncmp5751 There's no such thing as "best armor".
Also, hardness is not a test of strength. It is extremely easy to produce high hardness steel. In fact, taking the hardness (due to high % carbon) OUT of steel and therefore increasing it's toughness, is the hard part.
If either of you watched the video, it should have been obvious that materials science is not as straight forward as strong vs. weak or best vs worst armor. Improving in one category, e.g. hardness, inevitably makes your steel more brittle and prone to cracking. Similarly, using a more ductile steel, generally makes the material tougher and able to better withstand impact, but makes it easier to penetrate, warp and bend under stress. And this is just a single consideration. There are also many other considerations like weld strength, machinability, ANGLE OF IMPACT, time and resource cost to manufacture, etc., etc..
Nickel was one of the scarciest alloy for Germany in ww2. That is the reason it was taken out in the later war doesn`t matter which tank.
@@mcs699
Of course there is better armour and worse armour. Armour quality varied. The Tiger I's nickel steel of 265 Brinell Hardness on 100mm thick plates was concluded by British testing on Tigers in Tunisia to be 13% stronger and more shell resistant than the best allied steel of the same thickness.
The British actually tried to emulate this for their Tortoise project.
Source : Thomas L Jentz, Germanys Tiger Tanks.
Write your own book with primary sources refuting it if you wish. The world is your oyster son.
When this person writes stronger, I think it is a reference to actual firing trials, using guns against captured armor, including whole tanks or the wrecks thereof. So it’s probably pretty accurate. The Tiger’s armor did get a bit spotty later in the war though. Soviet trials found the armor of the King Tiger more prone to cracking than the earlier armor of the Tiger 1. As mentioned above, alloying elements, time to do things right and skilled labor were all lacking.
Another issue with manganese is that manganese steel is air-hardening, necessitating the use of an annealing oven to control that aspect. After WW2 the Japanese steel mills were throwing railway rails into the melting pot without consideration of the likely consequences. This may have been a result of experienced men being lost during the war.
The problem was discovered here in Wellington, New Zealand, just down the hill from where I live, at the old William Cable facility on the Hutt Road, opposite Ngaio Gorge. The front half is now a car park and the rear half is essentially a drapery cum craft shop.
A large steel beam-made in Japan-was lying on its side, intended for use in a standard NZ Railways ‘plate girder’ bridge. Some of the men sat on it to have their lunch and the works prankster decided to have some fun with them. He grabbed a ‘tripping hammer’ which was used to undo bolts on a ship’s engine cylinders and hit the beam in the centre of the web. The beam split down the middle, as witnessed by my now deceased friend who was an apprentice at the time.
The subsequent investigation revealed the aforementioned deficiencies at the Japanese steel mill and probably saved quite a few lives around the world.
If you study the German side.....The German economy suffered very much from a shortage of steel alloy metals. It was in a lesser extent the tank type as P IV, Sturmgeschütz, Panther, Tiger rather than the availability of alloys. There might be a dfference in Czech that built the Marder, later 38T Hetzer as they had their own iron ore, steel manufacturing. I do not know. In the first years of the war the German armor had a high content of chromium, some nickel, manganese. The steel was air hardened. The alloy quantity was reduced especially the nickel. The steel became oil hardened. In 44/45 the armor plating steel was made with very low alloy content. It was water hardened. This steel did show cracks in some cases after the impact as shown in the video.
From what I know about how industry was being run by the party, there were layers and layers of people who didn't know what they were doing added to every enterprise to insure political reliability. It would be interesting to see if the papers were still in existence about how the choice to use brittle metal was decided.
fascinating stuff! Happy to see there's still some in-depth content that can be found on YT
Glad you enjoyed it! Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
@@wealdfoundation subscribed :)
Excellent - really looking forward to pt 2
Glad you enjoyed it! Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
Germany produced high quality AP rounds. So it's unlikely that they were lacking behind in metallurgy.
It's just some different approach. Each plate was designed to to offer high protection for the lowest weight, against the caliber it was supposed to protect against.
If you shoot a Panthers side armor with a 75mm, it will crack and spall. But it also was not designed to resist such calibers.
Every other medium tank in WW2 is easily penetrated from 75mm shells from the side.
Even the anemic German 37mm could penetrate a Sherman side armor from 200-300m at normal impact.
Almost every decision by the German Army in WW2 is based on maximium effecency for a certain criteria.
This however often lead to side effects that basically negated any of the positive gains.
The German mindset would want a weapon that is 120% as effective as the enemies, without considering that it will be only 80% effective in other scenarios.
Brilliant
Great video.
For reason CZcams appears to have unsubscribed me?
I just re-subscribed
We do know that as the war came to less than a year before the end, Germany had problems keeping up the quality of their armor as some of the alloying ingredients were becoming more difficult to obtain. It’s always interesting to see people insist that the Germans had the best technology during the war. Some of it was excellent, to be sure, but some of it was dreadful.
The whole purpose of german superweapons was to keep the engineers from getting drafted and to earn the board members and shareholders enough money to live comfortably post war.
Running low on resources does not mean they had bad tech. Their tech except in radar was very advanced and we still use improvements of their designs today like Infrared optics, manpad shoulder rockets, heat warhead panzerfaust (rpg7)
And tons more I can’t think of off the top of my head. Modern Jets also followed the German over the British turbine design
And yet you would rather site in the panther facing that sherman than the other way around
@@fluna9724 I’m just being realistic.
Pretty cool!
Looking forward to part II
A fine primer on the topic of tank armor. Well worth auditing. Liked and shared.
Thank you for making this informative and entertaining video for us.
Glad you enjoyed it!
A review of Japanese armour would be interesting as well, as Japan has always had poor quality steel. That's why they had to fold their sword metal 1000 times since the steel quality was so bad.
Japanese swordmaking is rather irrelevant to modern Japanese steelmaking. Old-fashioned bloomery smelting _does_ produce iron with a great deal of slag inclusions from Japanese ores, but that was no longer the case once Japan adopted modern blast furnaces and decarburisation. Not to mention that a great deal of Japanese steelmaking during the imperial period took place in Manchuria with better continental ores.
🎖️🏆⚡🤗
Thank you for sharing this
Glad you enjoyed it! Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
Well explained complicated subject. I now know why German tanks have shattered armour plates. Would be looking for part two.
Glad you enjoyed. Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
I'd heard of the 38(t) having brittle armour, and I've wondered if that was also a problem with the TNHP sold to other countries, or whether it only applied to the tanks built for the Germans?
Siemans-Martin method used in CZ steel. Sub-par.
😊 🍿 always interesting to learn more about the wonderful world of Tanks 💥
Glad you enjoyed it
many thanks for explaining the long words
You are welcome!
Fantastic! I look forward to part 2.
Can you do something about welding of armor plates?
Glad you enjoyed it! Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
Armour on bismark was called wotan any intell please ?.
It's all well and good up until about 1944 when the quality of German steel dropped dramatically. Then they were using whatever they could get their hands on.
I like the Panther has somekind of license Plate. Wouldn't want to be found driving around in an uninsured Panther on the battle field now would we.
Jeez?...That hull gunner position in the early D's eh?.....-Whos bright idea was that anyways?
I can just hear the PanzerTruppenschule lehr training officer speaking to the rather perplexed, chin scratching n' nervous future funker:
"Yeah, ya just OPEN up the rather large HOLE in the GLACIS, stick yer banger outtve it, bang away till your done, that, or the HOLE & the enemy will bang away @ you until its DONE with YOU. Pretty simple-ish really, youll get the hang of it"
very interesting video! this is kind of information i was searching for.., looking foward to part. 2. and 3. if you keep 15.min limit.
Glad you enjoyed it! Please make sure to check Armoured Archives channel for more informative videos.
Health and Wealdfare
Thank goodness for that poor armor quality. A lot of Allied tankers might not have made it home if it had been better.
These are only exceptional examples. Much exaggerated.
Panther -"fecking hard I am"
Conclusions are based on unknown testing methodology and conditions of armour when evaluated. There is a biased tone rather than an objection one; recycled propaganda. 🤔 😀
Enough German combat records and destroyed German tanks examined in after action reports tend to show that this is a pretty accurate review of German armour quality.
Wehraboo seething since 1945 lmao.