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.

Tiger I

[Black-Man]

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 went to high school with this kid

[usul294]

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.

Re:panzer tank ???

[Anonymous Coward]

panzer != tank
panzer == armor

Only $2000? I'm all about building one.

Re:420 what?

[Sangui]

He enjoys his reefer.

Re:Tiger I

[slarabee]

There is a video on the linked story.

Looks like five road wheels and a raised drive wheel on the front. No interleaving. It is not accurate but closer than some movies have come.

Re:panzer tank ???

[redcaboodle]

panzer != tank panzer == armor

Panzer can mean both.

Re:panzer tank ???

[coyote_oww]

IIRC, the Panther was the PzKw V, Tiger was PzKw VI. The confusion is reasonable though, since the Tiger was actually deployed first (again IIRC). This model seems to be based on the Tiger.

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!

Re:panzer tank ???

[AKAImBatman]

The kid called it a half-scale replica of a Tiger I in the video. Just so there's no confusion. :-)

Re:panzer tank ???

[Keith_Beef]

I believe that use of the word "Panzer" is a an abbreviation for "Panzerkampfwagen", which roughly means "armoured assault vehicle".

hail all ye rounders

[paiute]

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.

Re:panzer tank ???

[cyxxon]

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.

Re:panzer tank ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Native German speaker here - I can confirm that "Panzer" means *both* "tank" and "armour".

Re:Okay

[zeroduck]

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.

Re:Sane police

[Kazymyr]

You're welcome to try. It's a Diesel - and Diesels may not be fast, but they have lots of torque.

Re:Sane police

[Dannkape]

I know I'm not supposed to actually RTFA and stuff, but in the video he says it's an old generator from his job at a generator factory...

Re:Sane police

[darthdavid]

True the cop had balls of steel but not as big as your post implies. It had no ammunition on board and the retard that stole it beached it on a concrete divider (which is what allowed the cop to jump up on it in the first place).

Re:panzer tank ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it'd be more like "Armoured Combat Vehicle". The German word best approximating "assault" would, I believe, be "Sturm". The Third Reich was rather fond of the word, and you see it used in Waffen-SS ranks, on citations and suchlike.

It's the weight that causes road damage.

[oddaddresstrap]

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).

Mitsubishi made a hell of a lot more than engines

[patio11]

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.

Re:Wirklich Deutscher? (Really German?)

[cyxxon]

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