Greetings Tankers!

Thank you for your patience, I’m very excited to bring you this update!

First order of business, progress reports!

Framework: Beckett has done an outstanding job working and reworking his framework drawings to maintain the highest level of accuracy, after all, it’s off of this frame that the shape of our tank is based. He even worked a little bit in AutoCad’s 3d function to bring us the wireframe orthographic view. Looking good!

(we also got business cards, they’re sweet, more on that down below)

Turret: Tristan has come very close to a final design for the turret drive mechanism! In this design, the housing is made from 3.5″ schedule 80 steel pipe and pipe caps, with some cuts and holes. Round, compact, and at exactly 4 degrees of turret rotation per turn of the handle. Well, 4.007 degrees of traverse per turn but I think that’s close enough. Historical accuracy is his “thing”.

Steve put in many hours on the running gear this week, mostly modeling the wheels so that the internals can be calculated. I’ll have screenshots/printouts of his final product for next week I assume.

Business and Business cards!

Our paperwork has gone in to officially make us an LLC! Replica and Restoration Works LLC is the name chosen by the team, mainly so as not to limit ourselves to tanks, but also because it sounds a bit more. . . . [safe?] than Das Kriegsministerium, let’s be honest.

We also got 200 business cards in 3 different variants (see below). We’ll be needing them because tomorrow we go to Fort Indiantown Gap! That’s right, we’ll be at the Battle of the Bulge reenactment tomorrow and Saturday! Super exciting and I can’t wait to talk with some of the tankers/actors there.

We also have access to Solidworks, so maybe more 3d items will come your way? Who knows? It’s all very exciting.

That’s all for tonight! I’ll post pictures of the reenactment on Sunday!

-T.Ankmann