bastid turny things; one spun round while i wur hitchin up full water trailer.. result.. fooker hit the deck, well it would have if me foot hadn't bin there, me big toe burst like an over ripe tomato
Yup ..... just the job for a soldier in a shooting war ... foot ****ed by his own trailer. One thing getting shot by an enemy - fair do that, but getting ****ed by your own badly designed kit is most certainly not a fair do, and one man knocked out that way could screw up an entire unit with dire results.
There should be (there very seldom was and even more seldom is now) a SECOND length of toilet-plug chain holding a steel pin which passes through one of TWO cross-drilled holes UNDER the hitch beside the split latch which is supposed to stop the whole hitch from rotating. The cross-pin should hold the latch UP (ring locked non-rotating) or DOWN (ring free to rotate).
These pins also tended to slip out, and would then be left dangling under the hitch ready to get ripped off by the first object (usually a branch fallen off a tree) that it caught on in your next forest location. This steel pin should have been "retained" in the hitch by a spring-loaded ball, but mud and rust and wear soon put paid to that bad plan, and in the unlikely event it did stay in that's because it RUSTED in place which meant a REME job to get the bugger out and that meant truck VOR for however long it took. Great design huh?
And in Slob's case, the stupid part is that the water trailer probably had a NON-rotating hitch, with a big warning plate on the trailer that you MUST let the towing hitch rotate. But no-one thought to mention to the driver to LOCK the hitch while hooking on the trailer, and only AFTER it is hooked on and shut, to undo the anti-rotation jaws. That's because no-one gave a ****, and no-one got off his arse to go out and TRY it properly before the damned thing was mass-produced by Dixon-Bates and others and bolted on to the arse end of every army landy and truck for 50 years
Another example of something being designed and put into service by a bunch of ignorant assholes who had no idea what they were doing, were too bog-idle to go out and speak to the working drivers, and who didn't give a **** anyway.
CharlesY
