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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.
... will you be my research advisor?
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
if there was ever a time this tag really fit.... =P
http://kered.org
Is that $10,000 dollars as opposed to $10,000 donuts or !10,000 dollars, or what?
Also interesting to see what they will write on the parking ticket...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"panzer tank" ??? where did this come from ? the redundant department of redundancy ? panzer already is german for "tank".
you either say "german tank" or "german panzer", but "panzer tank"??? sheesh.
What ? Me, worry ?
http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html
Note the last part. The Flint Journal must be extremely confident in how road-safe this tank is.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
It's refreshing to read about police who aren't trying to taser everything that fails to conform.
Someone driving one of these and talking on a cell phone.
At first I thought about the MPG it gets. Then I though it doesn't matter when you can just go in a straight line. Buildings-shmildings.
Hats off.
There goes a truly great future engineer...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
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.
i see the "420" on the turret. i wonder if that's Hitler's Birthday, or something else?
I've heard of "shotgunning", but that's ridiculous!!!
With a top speed of 20MPH, he must get a lot of tailgaters...
well, not the same tailgater twice with that cannon...
A Human Right
And now all the bullies that took this geek's lunch money as a kid will run in fear - as the geek now has a tank.
According to TFA, it shoots Red Bull cans.
Liberation through overpriced syrupy caffeinated beverages! Bet Rommel never thought of that.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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.
It's adorable. Does he call it Bonaparte?
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Dick cheney will buy it and use it for duck hunting with a bunch of dems.
You thought you looked awesome in that golf shirt and pimped out golf cart on the back nine? Wait till your friends see how you roll with a mini panzer!
Mind if I play through? *adjusts turret* Of course you don't.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
In case you didn't catch it, he built it all for paintball! THAT'S AWESOME! For $2000 total that's not bad if someone were to built another one. Although call me crazy but with gas prices, I'd wanna build a more fuel efficient pod racer instead lol. Btw I love where he says all you gotta do is put a slow moving vehicle sign on it or an orange triangle and it's technically a tractor.
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I would not consider this project complete until he finds a German midget to drive it...
This kid has a gold mine at his hands!
If he could mass produce this and modify the cannon a bit, he has the makings of the ultimate Paintball game.
The heck with these light-infantry paint ball games! I wanna be Patton!
- dj
Just wait until someone builds a half-scale anti-tank missile.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do people still watch attack of the show? Might as well say it is before any other organization. Your still l33t.
Just wait until tomorrow, when they have the story about his neighbor who built five T-34 replicas for the same amount.
My blog
"http: // blog.mlive.com/ flintjournal /newsnow/2008/04/ post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html"
"post moto kid death story here" ?!?
I'm thinking that there must be a "part two" to this tale!
The word "panzer" in English is a class noun that denotes a general type of tank, specifically German, usually of the WWII era.
Words in different languages mean different things, even if the sounds are the same, and even if the word is borrowed into another language. You're not insightful for your observation - you're ignorant of language and linguistics.
BTW can anybody tell me the actual engine (and gearbox) used on the Kettering version?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The first thing I thought of when seeing him climb out of it, is that he needs to put in a car alarm. I was half-expecting it at one point. Drive up in a tank, climb out, point the remote at it and "Bee-boop".
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Am I the first brother to RTFA? Will is a Theta Xi, one of the original (if not the first, sorry pledge trainer) fraternity founded for engineering students.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You must be new here. The sport of pointing out redundancies, errors, and speling mistakes is a wonderful sport, like NASCAR.
More Twoson than Cupertino
At Kettering, we do 3 months of school and then 3 months of work (paid), then repeat for 4 and a half years. Most of us have some money, or pretend we do. We're all Sallie Mae's bitches.
Until small furry rodents eat through his armor plating? I personally think this guy did a better job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
That's because proper editing and source-checking takes time, and that's something that needs to be done for *all* stories, so stop pressuring the editors unless you want Slashdot's normally excellent quality standards to drop.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
about that truck. we have to lift the shorter girls into it. literally. they cant reach the seats. i love it.
the whole thing came about with what we thought was a joke. Will asked one of us, If i were to start making a model of this tank, would you help me? (in ref to a hotwheels size model). So we said yeah, sure, whatever. And he comes home after class the next day with 2"x4"'s, 4"x4"'s, 8'x10' sheets of 1/4" and 1/2" plywood and starts working on it. And we were like, wow, he's actually serious. So we went outside and started helping. 4 hours later, we had a full frame.
if { x = x && x/x = 1 }, let {x = 0}, then { 0/0 = 1 }, but { 0/0 != 1 }, so { x != x }, goto your_head_asplode
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).
You know the Zero, the iconic Japanese fighter plane? Its full name is "Mitsubishi A6M", with the Zero bit coming from the Imperial Navy's designation (and not, as I mistakenly believed for a while, from a Mitsubishi part number). Mitsubishi, like a number of the largest firms in Japanese, used to be a zaibatsu (think sort of a megaconglomerate of businesses which the government propped up during the rapid industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries). Almost all of the zaibatsu were heavily involved in war production, as was almost any American company of any size for the duration of the war.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is still one of Japan's leading armaments makers, incidentally. I live a few miles from one of their fighter plane factories. Its related to Mitsubishi Motors, which is probably the company most Westerners think about when they think Mitsubishi. Other companies in the group do banking, insurance, nuclear power plant construction, food services, etc etc.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Yes, thanks for showing that there are fringe cases, like the one with the armadillo you posted. Too bad that Leo doesn't sort by usage or even knowledge of the usage in the general populace, as all the other entries in that list are really not something most people know...
To simply work on that list that Leo comes up with: shell and biological shield are technical terms from very specific fields, casing would usually be translated as Gehäuse no matter how hard/armored it is, an insect's carapace or shell might indeed be called Panzer or Panzerung or Schale, but IMO that is also a rather technical term seeing the manifold discussions about insects carapaces in peoples daily life, and what the heck is a loricate, or steel jacket? Hard to judge without further explanation, but to get from jacket to Panzer seems rather far fetched to me, as a German, yes indeed - try to understand the impressum on my very much out of date homepage.
As a side note: the new reply feature makes it hard to use German umlauts, had to resort to using HTML and using ä