News Archive 3-25-03 to 1-4-03
3/25/03
Well lets see if I can get caught up a bit here. It's about 20 to midnight right now which is a lousy time to start working on an update but this is the best opportunity yet.
Inspired by Brets Sherman Josh Henrichs sent in pictures of the tank he's currently working on. Josh sent these in about two weeks ago and I apologize for the delay. By the look of the pictures I think he's going to have a tank slightly taller than Brets and will have similar proportions to our Tiger in the height and width areas. What I find especially interesting is that Josh considers this to be more of a test bed for ideas than what his final tank will be. I crack up when I think back to our proto-type tank and how naive we were back then.
Josh Larson sent in this link http://www.doitgulfcoast.com/ftwltn/mutantmachines/mutantmachines.htm if anyone is interested in renting a PAV head to the Fort Walton Beach area of Florida a bit east of Pensacola.
I also got an e-mail back on the 9th about the new tanks at Skirmish. This has been posted on Warpig but just in case anyone missed that check this out http://www.skirmish.com/whatsnew.html#tanks I can't tell if these are actually built on anything that moves or if they're just shells that are either pushable or static. I think that they're looking to add some realism and expand their D-Day event.
Andy Dorsai sent in this picture of something the airsoft guys are up to. As Andy said "A full scale HMG M2 that fires plastic pellets. All they need to do is insert an electric triggered paint maker and a differnet barrel." As is it'd definitely make a nice prop for a tank though.
3/22/03
I can't believe it's been three weeks sorry about that, things are still pretty chaotic here from the flood and I've been chopping up PVC of various diameters into little inch high sections in order to get all the 'water sensitive' stuff off of the floors throughout the apartment. Hopefully everything will be at least put into well enough order this weekend, well at least as much as it ever is around here.
I should be able to put up a better post tonight but here's the latest modifications of the x-cannon. I had discovered a flaw in the central T in that the schedule 40 2" male fittings are actually a bit too small for the Nerf rockets. I'm going to glue a piece of PVC into this third T for now. For those interested that piece of PVC at the top is 2 1/2 and the pieces lying on it are all part of my next cannon project, gotta try to out do the Zoeller heh heh heh. I really could use a lathe and a drill press for this though.
3/1/03
Well this has been a pretty lousy two weeks for me. Too much snow and then a small flood in my basement apartment. I'm running a forced air kerosene heater in the living room right now to finally finish drying the living room rug. My apologies for any delays on posting the stuff sent in lately. In addition to delaying work here on Armored Fist I'm also very behind on trying to get the S-10 Blazer running for the AFX. I must say though I'm already getting that 'Tank Season' vibe. I think despite the recent trouble it's going to be a very good year here.
James Moir, of Kartoon Express the Texas division of Bill Bailey's Woodland Warriors sent in pictures of their tank Tiny Toon. James said it's loosely based on a lawn tractor. It has a 13 HP motor and a hydrostatic transaxle. The engine has been moved to the rear, and the driver to the front. In the center is a motorized, sit-down, 360 degree turret. It has gun ports for the driver, and in the turret has 2 2" nerf cannons, and an R/T A-5 in the coax position.
By the look of this picture it has a really good turning radius. Looks like Texas is turning into another 'Tank' state.
Michael Miller sent in these next set pictures through Dawn of the tank he and his friends are working on. They've overhauled the engine, beefed up the suspension and are working on the tank frame now. They're planning a turret with a rotary cannon along with gun ports for both hand held guns and hand held air cannons. Along with a remote ignition cutoff system, PA system, CD player, Siren, Steam Whistle, lights and a rear loading ramp. By the sound of it their tank is going to actually be louder than our Tiger hahaha. I don't think we'd ever add a steam whistle but you never know about a siren seeing as George is a NYC Fire fighter. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Butch beefed up our own stereo system upon hearing this he was already talking about adding a second alternator for some reason. I couldn't tell from the pictures but this one may have 4 wheel drive, looks like they started out with an old Post Office truck which were basically Willy's Jeeps so it may very well be one of the best off road capable tanks out there. Michael and his friends are another batch of Florida tankers.
2/16/03
Well it looks like the tanker community may very well get a second web site devoted to PAV's! There aren't many pages dedicated to paintball vehicles and I hate to say it but there are some that don't seem to last very long. There are several that have been around longer than Armored Fist but generally those tend to be smaller sections of a more mainstream paintball site. There's a post on the Warpig tank forum pointing over to http://www.pbtanker.com/ from smakman. It looks like Armored Fist may be getting some company in the tank dedicated web site department. Hopefully this is an indicator that the paintball armored vehicle world is growing a bit.
Hearing about 300 player events with 8 tanks is another good sign. Got a short note from Bill Tison about Thunder Island and it sounded like everyone had a great time and HellFireTeam had a lot of fun going up against Team Got Balls?
I'm off for the week, gotta love working at a school district. George is also off making his annual run to Daytona for the 500, which starts in a half hour as I type this. I don't know if he's going to be working in Jr's pit again as the fireman for this race but I'm sure that he's smiling in Florida right now where ever he is. Me on the other hand, well I'm stuck in NY with yet another run of Canadian artic air and it went down to something like 10 degrees last night without the wind chill. This damn cold weather may very well ruin any hopes I had of getting the tranny back in my old S-10 Blazer this week. I also forgot to pick up the kerosene forced air heater from Georges before he left and there's just no way I'm even going to consider working on anything outside in the current cold weather. Not to mention I don't even know for sure if the tranny will work anyway. I just can't wait for winter to be over. This is easily the most depressing winter I've been in for many years for some reason.
On to air cannons. Looks like the Zoeller worked out well for Bill in Florida. Now if someone can develop a way of using it with a paintball load. I've encountered a number on internet conversations on the subject and have found some of them quite amusing. Just to be certain I went back and went over Bill Mills write up since it's one of the most accepted all purpose air cannon write ups. As far as I'm concerned that article covers everything very well. I strongly believe that if a person cannot build a safe and effective air cannon from that page then they most likely should not be messing around with these things. During my own research I found out exactly how those solenoid sprinklers work. For some odd reason I had the solenoid action reversed in my head and I'm pretty sure that I can modify one of the many sprinklers I've got lying around to be air actuated. Although I don't think it's going to be at all hard to pull off I just don't want to waste the valves I bought last spring prior to re-discovering Spudtech.com I still fully intend to pick up at least one more Supah+ valve from that site along with an air actuated sprinkler valve. I seem to be well on my way to building quite an arsenal of paintball cannons. Looks like I'll have at least two working ones within a few days. I can hardly wait until spring so I can start making comparisons between several different valves. I also came across another batch of Nerf pocket vortex rockets at a Toys R Us and wiped out that inventory. I believe we have about a dozen in the Tiger over at Georges and I've got about 2 dozen here. I have been finding more of the purple ones than the orange or green ones. Someone mentioned that they stay away from the purple ones because they're harder to see when you go looking for them. I actually had an easier time finding the purple ones over the orange ones at the last PBLI Big Game because the fins were easy to spot when the football was buried in the leaves.
I also got word that it's not easy to find the link to the Supah valve. One of these days (maybe even this week) I'm hoping to go over the links and set them up properly. Who knows maybe I'll even fiddle with Armored Fist as a whole it has gotten quite cumbersome in some ways. In the mean time here's the Supah and a link to the Spudgun technology center.
2/9/03 evening
John M. of Bad Company II out of Naples Fl sent in pictures of their new tank. This tank recently debuted at Thunder Island. An interesting word of advice from John "DO NOT play the Barney theme song it draws friendly fire as well." For all us with automotive perspectives the white lights are on the FRONT of this machine.
2/9/03
Mostly corrections and adding stuff that I should've put up months ago. Updates to Tank Names for Got Balls, The Bad Monkeys/Anthony of TDF. Long overdue corrections to Bad Monkeys section for Anthony and also added a Got Balls section in the Fl/Ga Gallery. I'll probably expand the gallery picture of 'The Peacemaker' in the gallery when I move the one here in the news section into an archive it's a really nice picture with the sun. Action Creek tank pictures from Spplat Attack (with a very nice picture of the Sherman) and Hell Raisers tanks from Castle Conquest XIV added to Gallery. I also discovered that I somehow duplicated a good chunk of the News Archive I've removed the duplicates but it looks like I lost anything prior to October 2001, which if I remember correctly was mostly stuff about the creation of Armored Fist I did some minor changes to Site Map page, hopefully that will help with site navigation. I personally tend to use the site map to get around the Armored Fist site myself since it's a lot more detailed than the navigation bar at the top of all the pages.
2/6/03
Jacob from team 'Got Balls?' sent these pictures in last week of 'The Peacemaker'.
In other news my e-mail aggravation has gotten worse. Although I have absolutely no trouble receiving e-mail I have to log into earthlinks web mail in order to send anything. Well a few weeks ago they 'upgraded' that system and one of the upgrades seems to be a lowered amount of time before it would log you out. At first it was so bad that I was getting logged out by the time I got to the compose page immediately after logging on. They seemed to fix it at one point and I was at least able to get to the compose page with out getting logged out. Unfortunately it now logs me out without letting me know and I don't find out until after I hit send in the compose window. Since the compose window is a pop up of sorts, it's lacking any sort of back button so I lost a few e-mails and to make that even worse they were long ones. It was even more frustrating when I looked up the keyboard commands for the back button and they didn't work. Of course the first few times this happened it was well after mid night.
In case anyone missed my post over in the Warpig Tank forum I found some Nerf rockets at a ZanyBrainy in a local mall. They were the Vortex style and there was no sign of the Howlers. Dawn and I drove to two other ZanyBrainy stores and had no luck finding any more of the pocket rockets but we did find pocket rocket key chains and bought a few of those on a whim and to make the sets of tank keys easier to find. Dawn is using one to show people she talks to what the larger ones look like and I hooked one up to the keys of the AFX. We bought a third for the Tigers keys too. I don't know how much longer it's going to be before the ZanyBrainy stores close down but we got 8 vortex rockets at 40% off came out to under $20 with the taxes. We're planning on checking a few more on Long Island this weekend and if anyone else is interested you might want to check this link for a store near you http://www.zanybrainy.com/global/locator/ I'll tell you right now there is three stores in Florida ;)
AFX news, not counting the mini pocket rocket key chain I've actually made the first purchase towards the AFX project. It's one of those portable sun shade canopies. I also bought the side panels and I'm going to attempt to use it as a cheap portable garage. I'm pretty sure that it's very similar to the one used by the Action Creek tankers at the Shatner event so it'll be a dual use item. I'm also pretty sure that as it is now the Tiger will not fit under it but I think we won't have any trouble extending the legs to fix that. If this arrives before next weekend I'm hoping to put the tranny back in to find out if it actually works. It may be a pipe dream of mine in the hopes of not spending $500 for another tranny but I've half convinced myself that it will work and that the reason why I had tranny trouble with it was because the tranny had vibrated off of the engine, that's what I get for not having all the bolts but that's a longer story. Anyway it had backed off enough to stress the flywheel into cracking. I replaced the flywheel a while back and started it up but wasn't able to do anything after that. I've got the entire third week of February off so that looks like the project for that week. I just hope the weather gets a bit warmer. Anyone who has managed to find the AFX page here on the Armored Fist site should check it out. I put up my concept drawing for what I'd like to do for the Wild Geese game at EMR, it's a little rough but you'll get the idea.
1/23/03
Going through some of the pictures that were taken when Dawn and I went to EMR's Castle Conquest XIV I came across some Paintball vehicle pictures that I had forgotten about. I'm not sure but I believe that there are 8 PAV's that reside at EMR, as to how many of them actually work I don't know. The first one below is the Assassins Guild tank and the next three belong to the Hell Raisers. The Assassins Guild machine and the first two Hell Raisers PAVs are active and I think the third Hell Raisers machine is also active.
Also some pictures of some of the EMR bunkhouses.
1/22/03
There's a post on the Warpig Rec forum by Blue stating that the next Spplat Attack Charity event will be at EMR!!!
And There Was Much Rejoicing!
Anyone who has not been to EMR is missing out here's the front of Castle AAARRGH!
Left side
Right side
To give an idea of the size of EMR here's a field map
NOTE FROM DAWN:
I’ve signed on with Paintball2Xtremes magazine to write a series of articles about all things tank-related. T.J. has given me a lot of help with these articles, as have several other tankers, including Bill Tison, Bret Golihew, Todd Meyer, Jim Bergles and Steve Frey.
The first article, titled "The Tank Life," premiered in the February issue of the magazine. These articles are slanted toward regular paintball players with a passing curiosity about PAVs… If you’ve made your way to this website, you probably know more than the articles can provide. However, there are some great photos of some of the best tanks out there. What I’m hoping to do with this series is generate even more interest in tanks, gain publicity for the tankers (you guys work hard and deserve it!) and also encourage paintball fields to be more open to having tanks at their events.
The next article, scheduled for the March issue, will deal with building a tank, and the third, which I just finished up, will cover air cannons and turrets. Look for future articles to talk about tank tactics and their use in scenario games, as well as anti-tank tactics.
I’ll also be running a series of short pieces, exclusive to the PB2X website, www.pb2x.com. If you have a tank and would like to see your tank and crew get a write up there, please contact me at tankergirl3@yahoo.com, or e-mail T.J. through this website
In other news, in case anyone missed this in the Shuttle project pictures here are some details on a nice little addition to a rear loading cannon that is very suitable for Nerf Rockets. I don't think it'd be easy to use this with a paintball sabot round but I'm sure it could be done somehow. Anyway here is the Zoeller Valve.
It's PVC you can see how in the middle picture it's been glued to a 2" male threaded fitting. This was introduced by George Uribe, an old high school friend of George and I. George U. created the (as I call it) 'Octopus' cannon we took to the 2002 Spplat Attack. We're currently using the 30-0021 version which can be found here
You can see how it's setup on the X-cannon in this next pic.
Even though it's only rated at 25 psi I've used it with the pressure chamber charged up to 100 psi. I'm pretty sure it's safe due to the nature of the way it's used. Zoeller also offers a steel or iron version that's rated for up to 50 psi if anyone is interested. Just make sure that the flat part of the valve is pointed up like in the pictures and it should work great. You will lose some air when a shot if fired but it slams closed very quickly so I'm sure the loss is negligible. I've been told that drilling and tapping the flat surface, then running the firing valve through that newly created port would probably be a good way to make this valve close even faster with more efficiency but also make a more compact design when using sprinkler valves. Something to think about if you're planning on trying one of these out.
Due to the growing size of this page I chopped off most of it and put it on a News Archive page so that this page will load faster.
1/7/03
I was having trouble remote linking a picture of micro-blast so I re-posted one here. Although the Mayberry Marauders patrol vehicle is still my favorite this is a really good ATV PAV. My friend Gary built one at PBLI years ago that was comical, every time he hit the breaks a little too hard it'd wind up on it's nose.
1/4/03
Just a couple of pictures on the details of my air cannons air system.
