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backyard-run at Jake's
29/30 April 2006

text and more photos will follow ......

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view all these photos in sequence in the larger size by clicking here ...



here some videos ....

Tiger Recovery   5.6 MB


Krupp Titan TankTransporter   5.5 MB


Jake acquires his "trucker-license"   12 MB



From: Jake

Subject: After the Smoke Clears

I want to thank everyone that showed up Saturday(and their wives) as I had a blast. Saturday we started at about 10am and Willy and I waived the white flag and went to bed at 3am, got up at 8am, and the BOG-MOBILE headed for home at 7pm Sunday night. Roel, Dutch, and I took lots of photos, so we'll get them out to everyone. The weather couldn't have been much better. Willy and I had to put some warmer stuff on as it got cold as a bitch Saturday night and got windy, but it stayed dry, and no dew fell, and was really perfect for running.
We got through all the chit chat and got Nat up to speed then started general battling with everyone on everyone for awhile, then we broke up into pairs and started going at it. We all hadn't ran anything in such a long time that it took a little while to get going, but everyone did great, and Nat got up to speed real quick especially with Roel(must have been a jungle fighter in a previous lifetime) and Dutch opposing us. After about 2 hours of this, Nat and I were making an attack and shooting at their tanks that were in a heavier vegetated side of the house, and after about the third shot each we realised something was amiss, so we walked up and realised no one was operating the tanks and that they had taken off. Then Nat walked to the front and saw that the BOG-MOBILE had docked into my driveway ha ha ha. So we offloaded Willy(who packed really light if you can believe that), and then more chit chat, lunch, then we did more battling. I'm going to tell you all about a serious traveler. Willy has a cooler that plugs into his truck which has a separate battery system to run all the stuff that is in that truck. The sun room I have is about 14x20-some odd feet and there was only a small pathway through it as there was so much stuff around, and so much to go over and look at.
Roel was kind enough to bring down the 1/6 Tiger I from FOA. The thing really exceeds what your expectations are for the size of something, and we went through the box about 3 times looking at what's what. The third time I recognised what were the drive motors. I mean the tracks for the thing are over 8' long each to give you an idea. The detail of the parts is not very good and the majority will have to be redone. The builder had used PVC glue to get stuff together which at first impression looks horrible, but with wet sanding and using Evercoat automotive body filler it'll all come out looking great. The barrel pieces for example were glued together and the gun was in the recoiled position, I immediately fixed that, but will have to re-taper the recoil housing and barrel itself to get the look of the real one. I can do this on a wood lathe, so no big deal there. I think the worst of the detail were the foward and rear mudflaps which are just totally unusable. These we be replaced with proper ones. The exhausts and exhaust covers were also bad and will be immediately replaced. Good thing is the tank itself has a good base for doing all this stuff and will look great when finished. I'll be working on it off and on, but can't see completion of it until sometime in 2007 as I have a couple projects ahead of it that are a priority.
For those of you that haven't messed around with a DX6 radio, Willy ran through the thing for about an hour with me,and I'm thoroughly impressed with it, and Willy really has this thing 'wired' how it works. I'll be getting one very soon. You can program the rates of functions for about everything, and you can even save those settings and put multiple settings in and save it for each additional vehicle. Really impressive. When you tie it into all the mods and stuff Willy crams into a vehicle, it all starts needing a pad to start drawing electrical schematics. I'm still trying to digest it all. The reciever is tiny, and will give up a lot of space in the more tighter hulls too. Along with all of this, Willy went over a lot of other mods and configurations with a lot of his stuff that was just really great. I see where my money's going to be going ha ha ha.
The BOGMOBILE was really something to look at, there was so much crap in that truck that I was continually amazed. The original owners really put a lot of money into the add-ons in it. The damn thing probably would sleep a family of five comfortably it has so much room, and all I couldn't find in it was a bathroom. If there's one in it you could call it an RV ha ha ha.
During the night, Willy and I ran stuff and he has a lighting system on his Sherman that you'd swear sometimes were halogen lights they were so bright. We did some battling against it with my Pershing, and then switched to running his even more brighter 1/6 scale 'go litterally anywhere jeep. That thing would pull a lawnmower while you could see what you are cutting in full living color it's so bright. Really a blast to run. Hell, you could spot deer with the sucker.
Sunday mostly was truck driving and driving tanks on and off to transport around. We set up ramps and did a lot of this entirely different kind of driving. We had about 3 times the area of Danville to run on, and was really too much for the amount of people to use it all, even though we tried. Willy helped square away a lot of battery issues that both Nat and I had, and saved me three batteries that I thought were dead.
I know a lot of others wanted to come, but unfortunately couldn't make it due to normal life issues. Willy and I talked about doing more of these, especially in the non-rainy or cold season, so we're figuring out how to schedule them in the future. I had one neighbor kid who joined in and I loaned a tank to, and could have had about 10 of them if we put the word out to do so, but I tried to keep it just the club at least for this time. This was the first break I had this year, and I want to thank everyone once again for showing up, as you all really gave me a truly great weekend.

Jake


more photos from Jake :





April 2006

Willy
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