Slashdot Mirror
The DIY Tank
Will Foster, a Kettering University student, has built his own half sized Panzer tank. It took Will 2 years and around $10,000 to build his mini-tank and he says the process has been "a lot of trial and error...I'd buy a $200 part that didn't work, then go to a $300 part that didn't work before finding a $50 part that did." The tank is about as big as a small car, and can reach speeds of around 20 mph with its three-cylinder diesel engine. It runs on treads, has a cannon powered by compressed air from a scuba tank and parks wherever the hell it wants.
It appears he modeled it after the Tiger I. I'd love to see if he got the road wheels properly replicated - the "Tiger" in Saving Private Ryan was built on a T-34 chassis and was well... lame. The only war movie I've seen w/ properly depicted tanks was "Iron Cross" in the 70's which used actual T-34 even though it was a T-34/85 which did not see service until 1944 and the movie was set in late '43 during the retreat from Kerch.
This guy's been doing things like that for awhile. He and I went to the same high school for 2 years. He loved making stuff by hand and engineering things. He had this humongous truck, probably bigger than that tank that he constantly added stuff to. Will liked to bounce some of his crazy ideas off of us, potato guns and the like. Alot of crazy prank ideas too. I'm glad to see that he's still at it.
Visually, the Panther and Tiger are striking different. The Panther has sloping front armor, the Tiger has a thicker unsloped front plate - not quite as sophisticated, a more brute-force approach to armoring a tank.
Also, as I recall, "Panzer" can be taken colloquially to mean "tank", but the full name of the machine is revealing "PanzerKamphWagen" - which literally translates as "armored fight(ing) vehicle".
I knew all that SL/ASL would come in handy someday!
I believe that use of the word "Panzer" is a an abbreviation for "Panzerkampfwagen", which roughly means "armoured assault vehicle".
Err, no. I am german, and it is clearly Panzer = Tank. While, say, a piece of a medieval plate armor that goes to the chest can be called Brustpanzer (with brust = chest), and the word Panzerung means armor, the word Panzer itself just plain and simple means tank. Caveat: I do not know what the correct military bureaucrat term is for that, since they tend to have a word no one outside of the military uses, but in general german that is what it means.
The treads appear to be smooth and since his tank isn't heavy like a real, armored tank, it's not likely to do much damage. In the video, it appears to grind the pavement slightly when he spins in place.
The treads look to be about a foot wide and there's at least five feet of contact on each side. That would give him around 1440 square inches of contact area. If his tank weighs a ton (the "armor" is plywood, after all), it is exerting less than 1.4 psi (about half what a person does).