Thursday, April 10, 2008

"College Student Builds His Very Own Tank"


FoxNews reports that "A Flint, Mich., college student may never have to fight for a parking space again.
That's because he's built his own fully operational half-size replica German World War II Panzer tank.
"I took it home, driving it around in this white-picket-fence neighborhood, and one of the neighbors called the cops on us," Kettering University student Will Foster tells the Flint Journal. "[They] came and they just told us to head back home, but they were also laughing at it because they had never seen anything like that before."
Foster figures his mini-weapon of doom cost about $10,000 to build, most of it on trial-and-error research. It runs on a three-cylinder diesel engine and has a 360-degree turret with a working cannon powered by an air tank that can fire golf balls and empty cans of Red Bull.
He first designed the tank when he was 14, but only when Foster got to Kettering did he find a community of engineering geeks to help him build it. He parks it next to his Theta Xi frat house in a space labeled "Panzer parking. Violators will be totaled."
"Kids run after us like we're the ice-cream man when we take it out," Foster laughs."

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