5/3/05
Well after last nights 'behind the scenes work setting up pictures is quite a bit smoother. Still pretty slow when my computer generates the list of pictures in the default folder but at least I no longer feel as though I can get up and get a cup of something hot in the time it used to take for a single picture. I'm definitely going to finish the work on the folder setups so things should be much better by the end of the week or sometime this weekend. The only thing I've added is a few pictures on the AFX page for the work I've been doing on that.
3/8/05
Once again my computer is acting a bit on the strange side. Nothing that really impacts this site other than it tends to suck up my desire to do any computer related work once I get home. I've got 2 or three new tanks buried in my e-mail that I have to setup to be loaded here and that's the most pressing thing on the list right now. I was hoping to have done some major tank work and site work a couple of weeks ago but the weather and then work/cleaning in my apartment took up too much of my time. I've got some more days off coming in about 2 weeks so maybe I'll be able to start work on the the AFX for the coming season with a little luck.
2/13/05
Not much has been going on around here as far as tank stuff goes. Some interesting stuff on the Warpig Tank Forum though. I have a week off from work from the 21st through the 25th so if the weather cooperates I'm hoping to get some work started on the AFX then.
Our tentative scenario schedule currently looks like this, although there's at least one more game in May that Dawn and I will be at that I don't know if I can disclose yet. This also doesn't show any of the tournament only stuff we'll be at (such as World Cup) or any tournament games I'll be playing in with the Timberwolves. Right now any thoughts of having a tank at any of the EMR events listed is wishful thinking that will be determined whether or not the insurance issues can be resolved.
EMR Quest for the Holy Grail Scenario, April 2 (AFX modification?)
EMRs Castle Conquest, April 29 May 1 (definitely no playing tank)
Long Island Big Game I, Coram, May 21 22 (AF/Tiger and AFX/Panther, possibly two other tanks as well)
EMR Scenario Game, May 28 29 (probably no tank)
Cousins
Big Game Part II,
EMR Western Worr Game, July 9 10 (AFX modification?)
Michigan
Monster Game,
IAO
tournament/scenario game
EMR Scenario Clash competition, August 6 7 (probably no tank)
Big Game Part III Upstate, August 20 21 (AFX/Panther ?)
EMR Extravaganza sponsored by PMI, September 2 4 (no tank)
2/6/05
Well it looks like my computer trouble is behind me now. Still have to gets Dawn's pc up and running properly but at least we now have two working machines here now. Hers is still running on my backup drive but hopefully that will be corrected before the end of the week. My pc now has a new motherboard that seems to have cleared up my troubles. Although I did have a Cat5 line in the wrong port on the router here and didn't realize it for most of this morning. I haven't gone through everything yet but I'm pretty sure I got most of my files and there's only been a couple of odd things that have been uploaded to Armored Fist. Seems when I was recovering the more recent files from the working hard drive during one of my bouts attempting to fix my problems to copy to my backup drive a bunch of my picture files were converted to 8 character DOS names. So now I've got a bunch of duplicate pictures loaded up with tildas and numbers in them instead of their original names. There's also file or two that was sent up during one of the mini undocumented updates that is no longer in FrontPage, so I get an error when I do an upload. Otherwise the only real loss that impacts the site (other than lost time anyway) is I've lost somewhere between three and four months of e-mail. I'm one of those people who keeps almost every e-mail I download to my pc. That can make finding a particular e-mail a bit tough sometimes but it's come in handy several times over the years here with Armored Fist. Basically I have no e-mails from sometime in September or October to about mid-January. If anyone has sent me something during that time and it hasn't appeared here please send it again.
Another thing in regards to e-mail, anyone sending something they'd like posted on Armored Fist pleas make sure that you mention tanks, Armored Fist or something that will make sense to me in the subject line. This is really more for anyone who hasn't sent me something before than for anyone I've already replied to. The amount of Spam mail that gets to my 'questionable' folder is really quite ridiculous. I've had to set my Spam filter to the highest setting (like a year or two ago) which means anyone not on the 'approved' list is automatically sent to the 'questionable' folder until I get a chance to open it up and look at it. Things on the Spam front have gotten so bad lately that pretty much anything that has no subject in the header gets deleted without being looked at.
Although not tank news I recently tried out and made the roster on my old (and newly reconstituted) tournament team the LI Timberwolves. So now I'll be playing four forms of paintball, tank, scenario, recreational and tournament. That's in addition to any paintball photography I'll be doing. Luckily the photography usually overlaps the rec and scenario (and sometimes even the tank) aspects of paintball rather well. I don't know if I'll be taking any pictures when playing tourney but we'll see. Looks to be a busy year (and the damn computers better behave). The whole tournament playing idea had a rather interesting start. Dawn and I have been playing walk on/rec playing Monday nights about once a month with our nephews Michael and Steven. We also consider them to be members of the Panther crew and were with the AFX/Panther during the 2004 Cousins Plattekill Big Game. I was thinking that it would have been fun to play a local 3-man tourney with the two of them and started talking to Dawn about the idea. At this time the Timberwolves had been disbanded for a year or so and I didn't even think about that. Not two days after talking to Dawn about playing in a 3-man with our nephews she came home with news that the Timberwolves were getting back together. One thing led to another and so now I'm going to be getting back into playing tournament paintball at the amateur level. I never actually got around to seeing if Michael and Steven would be interested in playing a local 3-man tourney but I did manage to coax Steven into playing on the high tech field using Dawns Nerve. Michael wanted nothing to do with that field so it was just the two of us. While it seems I've ruined Steven as far as playing on the low tech field goes (and as far as playing with a low tech gun for that matter), I don't think I would have been able to talk Michael into playing a small tourney.
12/20/04
A little more information has come to light in regards to the launcher ban of OK D-Day and the Tour of Duty series. It seems that the broken window is not really involved at the core of the whole issue, pretty much making much of my rant yesterday pointless, thankfully. Bill Bailey who is the tank coordinator for OK D-Day has been working his butt off trying to accommodate these new insurance requirements and still let us keep using our toys. Apparently he's seen 3 of the homemade launchers fail and that is the real driving force behind the ban of homemade launchers. Bill isn't able to get into the Warpig forums for some reason but Head Hunter has gotten word from him and posted it up in the Scenario forum. Anyone interested can read the whole thread here: http://forums.warpig.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=5958. To be honest I'm more than a little concerned about tank cannons as well but this is at least starting to make sense. Although I think that proper inspections and maybe new rules restricting pressure would do more good than only allowing commercial launchers. Looks like 2005 is already shaping up to be an interesting year.
12/19/04
I finished the link banners. The two single tank ones were done on an impulse after seeing the size of the full banner. They're a bit larger then what I originally intended but working with MS Paint and MS Photo Editor is a bit on the limiting side. Also having next to zero art training probably doesn't help. Anyway, anyone looking for Armored Fist link banners has them now
RANT TIME!
It seems as though there has been some rule changes due to insurance over at OK D-Day regarding launchers. The basic gist is that homemade launchers will no longer be allowed. It seems that some of this is due to the broken tank window over at Skirmish during their 2004 D-Day event. To say that I'm somewhat aggravated over this is a bit of an understatement.
In case anyone here missed my assessment of the broken window over in the Warpig Scenario Forum here it is:
It's
very sad that an incident such as this could have such far reaching
repercussions. At this rate it won't be too long before insurance carriers start
banning paintball guns themselves due to some moron in the suburbs shooting
marbles from their paintball gun. Which I suspect is about the same thing as
this incident.
At this time the only thing that is known for sure is that a lexan window was
broken.
We do not know what broke the window.
I've heard it was a wooden dowel but it could easily
have been a solid cluster of paintballs. Anyone who has left a bunch of paint in
a pod for several months has seen those. It could have been a rock or a batch of
frozen paint or a couple of styrofoam cups filled with paintballs or even a
large steel ball bearing for all we know. Yes I think there's even a possibility
that it could have even been a Nerf. There's even an astronomical (literally)
chance that it could have been a meteor from space for all we know. I do know
that has happened a couple of times so why not?
We do not know what speed the object was traveling
at.
Say it was a Nerf, for this to happen that Nerf would
likely have to be traveling in excess of 400 fps, if not more. The same could be
said for any of the other objects as well. To tell the truth the only thing I've
shot out of any of my cannons beside a Nerf was an egg once. My dad wanted to
see that and while much of the egg made quite a splat on the side of my
grandmothers shed, it did not leave the barrel intact. But back to the point I
simply have no idea what speeds the other objects have to be traveling at to do
this damage. This is the result of a 400+ fps Nerf on a plastic flower pot: Entry,
Exit.
Basically this means 400+ fps Nerfs are bad, not that Nerfs are bad.
We do not know what was used to shoot at the window.
Seriously was this a regular air cannon? Could it have
been an unregulated combustion cannon? Could it have been three guys and one of
those giant sling shots? Could it have been a black powder rifle? Personally I
would guess the combustion cannon the most likely culprit but nobody knows.
Especially considering that when I first starting getting into air cannons I
kept hearing how hard it was to even get to 200 fps or even over 150 fps for
that matter with the typical paintball air cannon/launcher. One of the reasons I
had problems with the high speed Nerfs at one time was because I was using the
general rules of thumb for an electrically actuated sprinkler valve powered air
cannon, while using the phenominal Spudtech Supah+ Valve, which is quite a
monster for this stuff, in fact at one point Joel Surprise of Spudtech told me
I'd probably be better off with an air actuated sprinkler but I can be stupidly
stubborn sometimes when I'm trying to get something to work. At least for this
project my stubborness payed off and the Supah+ valve turned out to be a
fantastic asset that allows a much smaller pressure chamber 
We do not know if there was some flaw in the lexan itself.
This is also a possibility. Granted it is a slim
possibility but there is a chance that there was some small flaw in the lexan
from the factory that failed after all the abuse it was put through during the
event. There were 2700 people at this event as these pictures show, a lot of
them liked shooting the tanks: Painted
Falcon, Painted
Panther
Seems like an awful lot of unanswered questions that really should have some
solid answers before a whole mess of new rules are created to solve a problem we
haven't really defined properly.
I have no problem with people using the pictures I have up on Armored Fist to
discuss this but I hope that it is discussed rationally. In fact I have higher
resolution versions of most of the pictures I take if anyone would like them.
Some other basic lines of reasoning to this should be:
Is this an inherent flaw with launchers?
Is this a field specific problem?
Is this the basically due to the actions of a single ignorant person?
Is this simply a freak accident?
If anyone knows any of the insurance carriers
that may be inducing these new rules, please make them think about some of these
questions.
I changed the colors a bit above and the original post can be found here: http://forums.warpig.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=5763
I still have trouble believing that a window broken last summer could lead to these new rules. At best this shows a complete disregard towards basing insurance on reality. Instead of insurance based on reality we now have to worry about insurance rules based on supposition of what may have happened.
I really think that anyone from the paintball community that is involved with this company and who didn't make the unknowns of this incident clear to whatever insurance company that is responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves and should realize that they helped bring tanks one step closer to being insured out of existence and probably helped bring the end of paintball itself just a bit closer as well.
I can hardly wait to see what happens to the largest event of the year for tankers when this stupid insurance company realizes that most if not all of the tank cannons are the same basic types of systems the anti-tank launchers are.
12/18/04
I finally set up the video for Team Got Ball's new tank NOG, check the 12/12 entry below.
Tiger Commander Bobio of the Blackhearts sent these pictures of their Tiger in for me. The Blackhearts are based in Atlanta Georgia. It was built for the Millennium's Band of Brothers series and first used at Bearclaw in Tennessee. They painted it orange to be the General Lee for the Red Necks at Low Country's free finale. This is one of the best looking Tigers I've seen yet. Pretty much only Heath's Tiger surpasses it as far as active paintball tanks go. The Tiger out in front of Pegleg Paintball may look a little better but to my knowledge that is simply a prop to show people where the entrance is.
12/12/04
Captain Caveman of the Florida team 'Got Balls?' Sent in pictures of their new tank NOG. These are from Waynes World Grand Final where NOG was the winner of the Tank Award.
O.K. this took a little finagling but if you right click on the camera below and choose 'Save Target As..' you can download the video of NOG's semi-auto cannon and pop-up turret in action. It's in an mpeg format and is about 5.3 megabytes large, (not recommended for those on Dial-up). If you watch closely you can see the PVC casings fall out of the turret after the first two shots. The semi-auto cannons name is Dede and it has 17 round ammo capacity, capable of either Nerf or Paintball sabot type rounds. NOG itself is built on a Kawasaki Mule 300A. The turret is powered and can spin 180 degrees in 3 seconds. The lift brings it to a height of 10' 6" The cannon has it's own video feed capable of 4X zoom.
Captain Caveman also sent in pictures of the Mystical Warriors tank
I was looking over some pictures from the recent Blackcat Productions 'Night of the Catman' game and I spotted a very nice looking Tiger tank that I haven't seen before. I can't find the link to those pictures but I did find that it is owned by the Blackhearts Scenario team based in Atlanta Georgia. You can see some pictures of it in their gallery on there web site.
QTIP sent in a link for the Warthog's online home, I found the plush warthog picture online and just had to use it.
For those wondering about the Nerf rockets, it looks like Nerf/Hasbro has only discontinued the Howler version, the regular Vortex rockets are still up on their website and I still find them at Family Dollar stores
For those of you who don't frequent the Warpig Tank Forum and are interested in attempting to make your own version of the Nerf rocket JagDPanther put this very interesting link up back in October
mnotlyon from the boards has posted that the catalyst used for this stuff has not only a limited shelf life but also does not like the cold, so if you order it now during the winter, there's a good chance the catalyst will be ruined by the time it ships to you. The original Warpig thread can be found here: http://forums.warpig.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=4677
I'm absolutely sure there's a bunch of other work I'm neglecting to do here but we have a holiday family get together shortly so I have to stop here. Despite the nice weather I didn't get a chance to setup any air cannon stuff for testing. Luckily I get week off after Christmas so with a little luck I'll be getting some tests done then, along with a bunch of other Armored Fist related stuff, like maybe I'll even finish the Armored Fist link banner I've started.
12/4/04
Sports Illustrated!
This weeks issue of Sports Illustrated (the one with the Boston Red Sox composite picture on the cover) has an article covering IAO. Dawn and I got a nice mention in the article and it was for that article that I was taking those pictures for. Well after putting the AFX/Panther back together for the pictures they wound up not using them. With all the pictures I've taken for Paintball Sports that haven't been used I can't say I'm surprised, especially since I wasn't overly happy with the ones we sent myself. Still it would have certainly been very cool to have a picture in Sports Illustrated. Maybe we'll get Popular Mechanics next, gotta keep pushing out of the paintball industry, especially tanks. These are some of the pictures we sent in.
11/22/04
Dawn got a phone call a few days ago and a friend needed some pictures of both me and her along with the AFX/Panther. Of course (me being the lazy person I am) I never did any repairs after our last event. Most of my 'paintball' time lately has been either for actually playing or dedicated to 'photographer' mode (or a combination). Now I need to take this picture and (of course) the side that I need to take (mostly limitations to the back yard) is the drivers side, that is missing the it's track. What can I say I really thought the gap between those two trees was a little larger, hahaha. It was also without a cannon to top things off. So I procrastinate as much as I could and wound up being out in the backyard with my screw gun until about 11:00 that night. We woke up a bit on the early side the next day, did some more cosmetic touching up, balanced the camera on a work horse and snapped some pictures. I still wound up being late for work but we at least got some pictures.
I finally got around to going through all of my IAO pictures, picking out a bunch, renaming them and resizing them. I added something like 85 pictures to the IAO 2004 page. Not many tank pictures, since there were only three tanks but plenty of pictures altogether. We certainly had a lot of fun at that event.
I also got the pictures from the Cousins Newburgh game but it's now slightly after 1:30 a.m. and I'm simply not going to start that now. That will probably happen sometime after next weekend since Dawn and I are jumping up to Maine for Thanksgiving.
11/15/04
I know it's been like forever since I've updated anything here. I was hoping to do some work over the past weekend on the site but got wrapped up in other things. This is likely to be a short update but hopefully this weekend. Dawn and I have bee rather busy with a lot of non-tank related paintball but that is pretty much done (well for me at least) other than maybe picking up some games at the Cousins indoor fields with our nephews.
We were at the West Point fall game about a month or so ago and we got to play a bit and then switched over to 'reporter' mode the next day. Although they switched areas the terrain was fantastic lots of cover, very hilly with a lot of good firefight spots. I'm pretty sure the area was smaller than the previous spring game as well. We had hoped to take the Panther but decided against it for a variety of reasons which turned out to be a plus since there was a single road through the field and really no other tanks. It basically would have been more trouble than what is was worth. Santos of Hudson Valley X-Treme Games drove his S-10 Blazer through a couple of times with a couple of guys sporting one of Eric Englers guns (the .30 caliber I believe) out the back hatch. After the first trip they hung a thin plastic tarp over the hatch so Santos wouldn't get hit as much while driving. When they came back to the staging area I told Santos that he had brought paintball tanks to a new low.
I forgot to mention the page I setup for the past Shatner game. I didn't even setup a link to it on the sitemap page but there is one on the home page. I'm not sure if I'm even finished with all the pictures yet but I've got some nice tank pictures along with some good ones of the Ranger cannon. My big disappointment for that game was not being able to talk to the Army of Darkness guys and I didn't get enough pictures of their tank. Sometimes the added work of taking pictures for Paintball Sports takes up more time than I think it does and I lose track of stuff (especially when I'm trying to play too). Anyway for those who haven't seen that page yet it's here:
For those of you who know John Canida you'll get a kick out of these pictures. I actually took them prior to the 2004 Long Island Big Game during our promotion for the event. You know this may have something to do with why I don't aim the cannon on the Tiger any more, hahaha.
Leave it to me to go the World Cup in Orlando, one of the largest paintball tournament events and still get pictures that I feel are related to paintball tanks. I was talking about cutting up a couple of ATV's and stitching them back together to build an eight wheeler LAV-25 style paintball vehicle but after seeing this Gator I want to use one of these, just have to add another set of wheels. Ones that turn of course, hahaha.
I didn't think a golf cart could power a nice sized stereo until seeing this.
Seeing this made me think that with larger wheels it could make a paintball scout vehicle.
Of course I got pictures of a few friends, missed a bunch of others though.
8/26/04
It's beginning to look like the AFX will not be going to Shatner. At this point I'm not sure if Dawn and I will even be going, should know by tomorrow.
I'm starting a new page here just for Dawn. I'll still put up notice here on the news page for anything she posts but everything will be consolidated at Dawn's Page. She's got two posts up right now.
Dave Arnett of Charlie Co. sent in some more pictures of their tank, including a group shot.
'Qtip' Sent in pictures of his Warthog tank that played at OK D-Day alongside Julius.
Dawn and I took our nephew's Steven and Michael with us to the 3rd 2004 Cousins Big Game. There was a field change at the last minute and we almost didn't bring the AFX. In fact it wasn't used all that much either. Saturday was rained out a good bit although there was still people playing. Actually the four of us played a bit in the afternoon after it pretty much stopped raining. Sunday was absolutely beautiful and pretty much a perfect day to play paintball. I spent the entire morning getting the stupid tank started. I thought it was a bad battery connection but it turned out the alarm system (I forgot that was there) cut off the ignition. That system is pretty much disconnected and I'll be pulling it completely out sometime soon. Managed to knock off the drivers side track this time and got the cannon caught in a 'Y' of a tree and snapped the barrel. Nothing major but it was a bit on the embarrassing side. They had switched from the field across the street from the parking lot that was used last year to the fields adjacent to the parking lot. We were told that our tank was simply too big to fit but I walked the field and found there were two sort of trails that I could get through. I had to do a bit of rock climbing and even got stuck onto top of a large log that was hidden in some brush when I was doing the trial run during lunch. One things for sure the Tiger would never have made it through most of what I put the AFX through. I was talking to Steve Cusano after he had the quad out on the field. He told me that he wasn't sure if he could make it through one spot, until he saw the tracks just beyond it that I had left with the AFX going through that same spot.
One more thing for tonight. I know I've got a link over to the Warpig Tank forums at the top of the page but I feel as though it deserves more of an endorsement from me. I've talked to many people on many forums about tanks and one thing that really stands out about the Warpig Tank forum is that a large number of the people there have actually built or are building paintball vehicles. In most other forums when the subject of paintball vehicles comes up it's usually a bunch of people simply talking about tank ideas, not to imply that is a bad thing, in fact it's really a necessary part of the whole paintball vehicle 'thing' but the Warpig Tank forum is definitely a notch above simply talking about tank concepts. In other words stop by and say hi if you're interested in all things 'paintball tank/vehicle'
8/18/04
I still haven't finished the IAO page, or even got much done at all. The results for the tank contest can be seen here: http://www.realistictoyguns.com/contest_4_photos.shtml Looks like we have some future paintball tankers heading our way, Should be nice to see what some of those kids come up with when they join the rest of us crazy tankers.
I've gotten an e-mail from 'Qtip' with a couple of pictures of his tank the Warthog, that played alongside Rick and Mimi at OK D-day. I should have those up soon. I also got some pictures from Dave of Charlie Company of their tank and I'm hoping to have both tanks posted before we head off to the Upstate Cousins Big Game this weekend.
8/1/04
Tank Building Contest!
Ends Today!
I found this by checking the site statistics, sorry for the late notice but if people hurry they should be able to get something in today. I'm not sure if I'll be able to participate myself due to the weather but everyone should check this out to see if they want to give it a shot with their tank. Just head over to www.realistictoyguns.com or click the link below.
7/29/04
I finally put up the pictures of the turret construction for the AFX on the AFX page. I also did some updating to the AF crew page, added some pictures from NJ of George P, George U, Andrew and one of Dawn at Skirmish.
Also thought these two were pretty cool. I took these when juggling the Tiger and Panther around after Skirmish D-Day.
7/27/04
Still pretty beat from the IAO trip. I haven't really sorted through the pictures yet but here's a few teasers, hopefully the rest will be up some time later this week.
I put pages for the 2004 Cousins games, Coram and Manchester. Also added them along with the West Point page and the Skirmish D-Day page to the site map.
I also corrected the link for Team Bushwacker over on the Skirmish page. thanks out to Brian for pointing that out.
I lost about an hour or so worth of typing earlier when my computer locked up. Mostly e-mail correspondence, so there's a couple of e-mail's I tried to answer but my computer had other ideas.
7/20/04
Shrunk the pictures below to save on bandwidth. Dawn received some pictures of the AFX/Panther from Cleo Fogal and I scanned in this one of the Panther and Automagnus holding the line in the final battle. Granted Dawn and I went out there without our guns hoping to take out a German tank or two but Weltman beat us to them. Basically we just hung out amidst the flying paint and shot a few rockets here and there. Hit those two prop tanks along with a bunker and one of the landing craft, don't think they actually did anything. Although one of the German players claimed we shot him with a nerf and like the guy who claimed the Tiger got him a year and a half ago at the LI Big Game, he seemed happy about it.
Once again thanks to Cleo Fogal for the picture
(I'll get her website soon hopefully for those interested in other pictures from Skirmish)
I'm actually waiting for some fiberglass to dry right now as once again I frantically work on the AFX gear up for an event. Working fiberglass certainly takes longer than I would have thought. The turret roof I was working on didn't really work out well so that looks like it'll be a plywood/netting job for IAO but the new turret floor is working out very well and the new cannon support should be o.k. as well.
7/15/04
Dave Arnett of Charlie Company Paintball Club in Ontario Canada sent in this picture of the WWII Jag'd Panther (Hunting Panther) they built. I didn't know that Jag'd Panther meant Hunting Panther, thanks Dave.
Jerry Jr. Captain of the Minnesota Rebels sent in pictures of their tank 'LIL REB'. It's a tracked Cushman Trackster with two forward mounted PMI Piranha's powered by a 20 pound CO2 tank. Their home field is Splat-Tag in Michigan
Tim Harrelson of S.C. Roadkill out of Charleston South Carolina sent in pictures of their APC modeled after a WWII M3A1 and their anti-tank gun modeled after a German PAK 36. Tim is currently working on a Sherman for an upcoming scenario.
I don't remember if I answered Mark Guthrie's e-mail (from the 4-30-04 entry below) but he's in the Atlanta area, been to Wayne's World a few times and he and his friends are looking for some scenarios to take their tank to. If your reading this Mark we pretty much stay up in the Northeast. We've been as far as the Chicago area with a tank and that was one real nightmare of a trip. I think this is going to be the busiest Armored Fist year yet. Our tentative schedule is on the home page but other that IAO near Pittsburgh and the 3rd Cousins Big Game up in Plattekill NY we don't know what other events we might be taking a tank to. The fall West Point game is a very strong possibility, maybe the Skirmish World Record game and there's a slim chance that we might take a tank the the MXS 'Ghost Mountain' event at EMR in October. Dawn and I will definitely be at EMR's Castle Conquest and probably the Ghost Mountain event at the very least to report that event. Last time I checked tanks are pretty much a 'no go' at EMR. Although that may not apply to MXS events there (hopefully, fingers crossed). No tanks at EMR is pretty much in my opinion a great tragedy for tankers.
Also got word (about a month ago, I'm catching up on the e-mail now) from Tom Edwards of Airborne Assault SPR Paintball Team that they've completed their first tank.
Mimi of the Julius Tank crew let me use some of their pictures of Heath's full scale Tiger. Heath didn't have time to finish the track system but it's pretty obvious to me that when they're done they'll be every bit as impressive as the rest of his tank.
Here's some more pictures of Heath's Tiger courtesy of The Julius Tank Crew, Heath's Tiger
O.K. guys I've still got a lot of e-mail to sort through and I'm sure that there's at least one more e-mail in there that needs to be posted here, so don't give up on me yet ;) I've also got a bunch of pictures from work we've done on the Tiger and the stuff I've done on the AFX/Panther dating back to February. I'm pretty sure that most of them have never been posted. Hopefully I'll have some up before we head out to IAO.
7/13/04
Put up a page for Skirmish D-Day 2004. I took a bunch of other pictures, mostly of the opening assault on the beach. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to be adding any of those yet.
For those of you who thought the Hetzer ATV from the 2003 Oklahoma D-Day was impressive looking, Heath Riley who built that out did the Hetzer and I would say pretty much every other paintball vehicle out there with his 1:1 scale Tiger Tank. As he put it: "It was like driving a 1 car garage around ..measures 12' wide and almost 22' long not including the barrel." To think I thought we had problems getting around on some fields with our Tiger. Mimi from Julius sent me a link of some more pictures of it and I'm going to see if I can post those here as well. About the only other tank I've seen that compares to this on in accuracy and size is the Tiger at Pegleg Paintball and I don't think that that one moves.
I added some of the tanks from Skirmish D-Day along with Heath's Tiger to the Germanic Invaders gallery. I'll be adding the subs soon.
I got a forwarded e-mail from George that I've had for nearly two month's now from Jerry Jr. of the Minnesota Rebels with pictures of their new tank. My apologies to Jerry for taking so long to get those up and hopefully I'll be doing that tomorrow. It's a Cushman Trackster with actual tracks.
I've got another one that I've been neglecting for about a month from Dave Arnett Charlie Company in Canada of his Jag’d Panther that I should have up tomorrow as well.
I've got several other e-mails from other people that are up in the air, including one from Joe of the Frida Crew that will I will be going through tomorrow as well. Since it's now after midnight though I'm going to call it a night and simply update what I've done so far.
7/12/04
Well that was an extremely interesting trip. Once again the AFX/Panther although not finished went to an event anyway. At least this time out it had a decent looking turret. Of course that is far from done also:
I'm sorting through the pictures now and should have them up before the end of the week. I have the Tank Crew page pretty much finished for Frida and The Blue Falcon.
7/10/04
1:15 or so a.m. and we're just about to leave for Skirmish D-Day, should be an interesting drive. Had both the Tiger and the AFX/Panther out on the street at midnight, swapping them on the trailer.
7/7/04
I obviously didn't make that update I wanted the other night. Everything is getting hectic as we get ready to go to Skirmish D-Day this weekend. The fiberglass work is going much slower than I thought it would, although it is going much smoother than the Abrams turret I tried. I just finished setting up another batch of fiberglass panels that are curing now. I'm pretty beat and heading for bed but this was the last picture I took.
7/4/04
I'm sorry that I've been neglecting this site lately. I'm putting much of my paintball time into either the AFX or taking pictures for Dawn and of course work with the Tiger. I'm about to go out and start fiberglassing the turret for the Panther version of the AFX shortly but since I've become something of what I call an 'accidental paintball photographer' I'll put up a picture from last Monday nights pictures. Although most of the pictures are for Paintball Sports I'm sure that this one wouldn't be used in the magazine and I wanted to show it to a few people. This is Dawn with Bea Youngs and Bea's Karnivor.
Seriously though I should have a real update later tonight.
5/21/04
I've been told that I should put this picture up to better explain a comment I made in the Warpig tank forum.
5/17/04
I'm very tired right now, just pulled the AFX off of the trailer and put in in the backyard. Yesterdays big game was a blast. Sorry I haven't been putting up pictures of the work I've been doing but I'll do that soon. To be honest things didn't go the way I had hoped but we were able to use the unfinished AFX in it's Panzer V Panther configuration. Well sort of Panther anyway, I wasn't able to build the turret I wanted and had to toss together a 'One Hour Turret', with no cannon. Actually it may have been less than an hour but it was late at the time I threw it together and I was doing two or three things at once. It made it to the end of the day although it pretty much collapsed at the very end as I was driving it off the field at games end. I guess that one branch that made it spin around two or three times did more damage than I thought hahaha. It wound up in the dumpster before we left and I'm already thinking up it's replacement that will look very much like a true Panther turret. I took very few pictures at the event but here's a couple.
4/30/04
I've been really neglecting things lately but the next two weeks look to be very busy. The AFX has been neglected almost as much as this web site but the Tiger is nearly ready with the turret repairs and the new rear entry/back wall pretty much done with only a couple of minor things needed. Butch will be installing the Stereo system next weekend and the weekend after that is the first Cousins Big Game for this year.
In other news that isn't tank related but impacts things in my life, my wife Dawn will be starting as the Managing Editor of Paintball Sports International next Wednesday. The full press release can be found here: Press Release
I got an e-mal from Tim Gerlach pointing to the tank project he's working on. This one is going to be a one man paintball/airsoft machine that Tim is building pretty much from scratch. TANKWORX he's building a 1:2.5 scale version of an M1 Abrams. By the look of the pictures on his Photos page, this machine could very well turn out to be the best looking tank yet for paintball.
Hal King also sent in a another picture for the crew page of the Julius Tank Crew of himself and his wife Chency "Twitch" King. They're both regulars on the crew, they just couldn't make the West Point game.
Mark Guthrie sent in pictures of the tank he and his friends built using a '78 Datsun.
I'm pretty sure that I've missed a few things but I'm feeling really beat at the moment and I have to get up early tomorrow since we're taking the Tiger to the Cousins Coram field to promo the Big Game during a promotional event they're having with the local NY radio station Hot 97. Hopefully the next update will cover anything I've missed. By the way did everyone catch the picture of Weltman in the Castle Conquest XVII pictures?
4/26/04
Dawn and I went to EMR's Castle Conquest XVII on Saturday. I've got a bunch of other stuff I wanted to put up last night but I spent most of yesterday in a half asleep fog and didn't get much of anything done.
4/5/04
I've put up the rest of the pictures from the West Point Game. I'm also working on a getting a Tank Crew page up for the Julius Tank team, although I'm missing some of the regular members and have Kevin and Troy from the Gryphonians there now. I've got some running around to do but I should be getting back to work on the AFX later today and probably getting some work done on the Tiger tonight.
4/5/04
Dawn and I went to the 24 hour scenario hosted by the Army at West Point this past weekend. I'm working through the pictures now and should have them up soon. They set up at Camp Buckner, which is the (or one of) summer training camp for the cadets. That meant no heat for those who decided to stay in one of their bunk houses. Here's a few pictures for now.
I should have more up later tonight on a dedicated West Point event page along with some other updates.
3/15/04
Got an e-mail with an interesting tank sent in the other day. There wasn't much in the way of details on this one but as Chuy (aka: THE REAPER) said "I built it completely out of debris that I collected from along side the freeway; ROAD FIND!" I think it's a prop only although you never know, there could be almost anything under it's shell to make it move. Their web site can be found here: http://www.marauderspaintball.com/
There's some recent pictures of the AFX work on that page.
Doing some surfing on the internet for paintball tank stuff and I came across this that many of you will find interesting.
http://jyw.tacorp.net/usseries4/tanks/tank.html
I also found this site which looks like the start of a fiberglass job.
http://www.starbeast.net/Carl/the_mockup.htm
I also put Todd Meyer's Fiberglass Tips into the site map, which if you haven't read that yet it's a very good write up on working with fiberglass.
2/24/04
Couple of pictures over on the AFX page for today's work. Also did a bit of minor work to the Tiger Crew section
2/22/04
I'm pretty much drained right now and will shortly be sound asleep. Dawn and I covered a 3-man tourney at the Cousins Indoor last night on top of the work I've been doing on the AFX. There's a few new pictures on it's page. By the look of things at the very least Dawn and I will be at the Army 24 hour game at West Point on April 3rd. I'd like to bring the whole Armored Fist crew and both machines but we'll have to see about that. We might also be going to the 12 hour event at On Target Paintball in Pemberton NJ on April 17th. There looks to be a nice gathering of tankers at the West Point game and The Assassins Guild will be taking their tank to the NJ game so I really want to go to both games. George is in Florida and should be back soon so we'll probably be having a crew meeting next weekend to discuss all of this and with a bit of luck I'll have a good idea of what's going on after that.
1/27/04
Now I'm getting really pissed off and disgusted. I've been getting a deluge of 'Mail Delivery Failed' messages in my e-mail today. Supposedly they're all from a variety of people at Armored Fist, people I've never met or setup e-mail boxes for and in all likely hood people who don't exist. Apparently some lowlife spammer is using fake Armored Fist addresses to send out viruses. It seems to be some sort of W32 worm. So if you get anything that's infected that supposedly came from here it didn't. I'd love to get my hands on the lowlife that's responsible for this crap.
1/25/04
Although things have been quiet I'm starting to get the vibe that 'Tank Season' is approaching. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get the AFX project rolling again. George seems to have the same thing happening to him. We were discussing up-coming work on the Tiger and it looks like it will be getting re-skinned sometime in late March or early April.
Like it says above I've pretty much completely switched over to the new forum Bill Mills put up over at Warpig. I'm surprised that more people haven't posted there yet, hint, hint! hahaha.
I did some touch up work here and there on the site, nothing major just some of the little things I keep forgetting. Mostly tweaking the site map a bit.
Still debating on exactly what I should do about that bandwidth problem. So far it looks like everything has dropped back to normal levels so I'm no longer worried about getting another huge bill or one even worse. I'm pretty curious as to exactly why there was such a huge and sudden jump in the number of visitors, looked like this
I wasn't able to find out where all those hits came from either. As far as I can figure out from the stats the single largest category of that spike was 'no referral' but even that single group was less than 20%. I didn't think there were that many people out there who would be interested in paintball tanks over such a short period of time. On an interesting side note I entered a date range from the beginning of Armored Fist until today and according to my Urchin Stats I've had 267,264 visitors to the site since I first started it up. I've no idea where that 33,600+ number is coming from in my hit counter, even considering the time I wiped out that counter it should be much higher. Either way I don't think that's all that bad of a number to have visited here in the past couple of years.
1/13/04
Well I got the biggest surprise ever about this site yesterday, seems I exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit and got billed a rather excessive amount. Normally it costs me about $20 a month to keep Armored Fist up and running. Now this is a bit on the high side but I've got lots of space and fantastic support through Earthlinks web hosting. Luckily I haven't needed to use that support very often but the times that I have they were some of the best technical support I've ever worked with on the phone. Unfortunately exceeding my bandwidth jumped my bill up from that normally $20 monthly fee to just over $250 and that was just for a single month! I thought it was either a billing mistake or maybe I was simply getting flooded with new visitors. I couldn't imagine any reason why I'd get a jump in traffic especially around this time of year. Especially since I simply haven't done any real tank or cannon work outside of trashing my prototype semi-auto cannon. There hasn't been much sent in to me in the way of new tanks or anything that simply wasn't covered over at the Warpig forums. I'm doing a quick update that should cut back on some of the critical areas that are killing me in bandwidth and luckily I actually had enough reserve cash in my checking account to cover that bill but man that was one hell of a shock to me. I came very close to deciding to pull the site in a panic move since I also discovered that I couldn't access my web site stats and so I had no idea what the hell was going on. I'll be keeping a very close eye on things as I try to figure out exactly what I'm going to do about the extra traffic in case the quick fixes I implemented don't work. To be brutally honest I can't afford $250 a month, hell paying that $250 is going to really sting this time of year. What's even worse I was freaked out at the thought of the possibility that maybe a good chunk of that traffic was for only a few days and that my bill next month would have been even worse! That was a sobering thought, o.k. sobering isn't the right word panic is closer and I'm sure that panicking simply isn't in the nature of any of us tankers. Well I just got off the phone with the Earthlink tech support and at least now I can look over my web stats. One thing seems certain I don't think that my hit counter is at all accurate. This is going to take a bit of thought on exactly what to do.
As far as tank news goes, In case you haven't heard yet Bill Mills has been working on an upgraded Warpig forum. I'm already registered at the new one and it's a PHP based board. In my opinion it's light years ahead of the old forum. I don't know when it's officially going to be opened up and so I'll hold off on posting any links to it (other than the one I put up over at Tank Talk ;) )
In other news, I discovered this by accident after following a link through Tank Talk. Mt. Doom over in Alabama is having a contest for best tank design using a 1988 Suzuki Samurai 4x4, check it out here: Paintball Tank Contest
That's going to be all for now. I've got to go through the books and see about some finance juggling.
11/23/03
Well I'm finally putting up a real update. Unfortunately it wasn't inspired by any good news. I finally got around to picking up enough of what I needed to at least test the core of the semi. The first test shot was a spectacular failure. It broke in one place I was reasonably certain would have problems and another I thought would. Actually looking at it now with 20x20 hindsight I should have realized that the first failure would induce the second. Basically the bolt snapped at it's rear inside the air chamber of the cannon, it shot forward and snapped the front of the receiver off as well. All in all I'm not overly surprised by this and I still think the basic design is good. I think I'll either have to be more exact with it's next incarnation and beef it up somehow or just have some of it made out of aluminum. I am not look forward to that. Anyways here's the pictures of it. The center picture shows the back end of the bolt still inside the cannon.
While I was in Florida last August I was able to get a bit of tank related picture taking done. There's an Army Navy Surplus place on International Blvd. a few miles east of Daytona speedway and they had these nice little vehicles out on display.
Dawn and I honeymooned down in the Keys and we made a short stop to say hi to Bill Tison and I took these pictures of HellFire while we were hanging out. If you look closely at that third one you can see Bill himself in the background.
Some interesting web sites I've been coming across lately
The Redneck Guide To Building A Paintball Tank
I certainly feel as though I'm missing something but at this time I can't remember what. There's some other stuff around here that I haven't done anything about but that'll happen another time. Anyway with a bit of luck I'll be back into the swing of updating at least once a week.