Something that went out on the Abrams with depressing regularity was the turret hydraulic junction box.
It's a big slab of a manifold under high hydraulic pressure that has some solenoids in it and distributes the fluid where it needs to go.
It's not a dash-10 serviceable item, so it'd go to the battalion mechanics to be swapped out. They didn't fix them, they just shipped them back to General Dynamics Land Div.
The first sign that it'd failed was always finding fluid in the sub-turret floor.
When the mechanics changed it, all of the fluid was dumped into the hull. Fluid they left there for the crew to clean up.
How did I decide to get those many gallons of fluid out?
The bilge pump!
Now there were gallons of hydraulic fluid arcing in a stream ten feet from the tank in the middle of the mechanic's bay!
Where my TC told me to leave for them to clean up under the same rationale they'd given for leaving the mess in the hull.
Good times.
the manifold in a tank in my troop gave up the ghost when we were doing a shoot one night and peed the floor. You've never seen a crew get out of a tank so fast. So much can go so wrong on an Abrams...
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