T.ankmann

~Greetings, Tankers!~ So Project38 has this auto-publish updates feature that I was using on our website, but apparently it hasn't been copying over to this website. Anywho, we're still chugging along, slowly and methodically. We've been doing a lot of research to please the rivet-counters out there and to keep the tank accurate. we have a guy going to see Bob Graebe about a transmission and final drive, so we'll soon have some photos of that as well as updated website and schedule. I'll come back periodically to say hi and give y'all a what's what, but for weekly updates follow us at Project38.net and our Facebook page. Thanks! -T.ankmann

Greetings Tankers! It’s March, that means we have 243 days before November! Time flies when you’re having fun. We’ve been very busy and productive the past few weeks, working on all sorts of subprojects within Project38. So let’s get you all caught up! Events and PR Members of the team went down to Fort Mifflin to help the 193rd Rifles to clear up the hidden gun batteries south of the fort. A lot of work got done and we met with some amazing folks. Everyone was excited about the project, and in the evening we spent time talking with the 193rd and crew in the barracks talking about different aspects of the project. Thanks Don and John for your enthusiasm and support, and if you ever need a hand down there call us up! (full album of pictures here) About half of the work crew that weekend. We had just come off clearing brush and are tired, but happy with the work that got done. Schedule of Events We have received word that we will have a table/display at the Army Heritage Days at the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC). The coordinators there were happy to host us and we’re excited to be a part of their event! Look for us there, May 19 and 20. The event will host hundreds of living history impressions and reenactors and always is an impressive display. We will also have a table at the Memorial Day Weekend event at the Allentown fairgrounds. All weekend long from the 25th to the 28th we will be there networking and spreading the word. We’re in contact with 6 other events this summer to possibly attend with a booth/display. If you know of an event we should go to, let us know! Our Schedule has the events that we plan on attending. BUILD UPDATES! Ah but this is what you’re really here for isn’t it? How much closer are we to the final engineering product? Much closer! Turret: Work on the turret has been steady and encouraging. While some parts have been difficult to accurately dimension, overall I think the faithfulness to the original is pretty close. While none of the internal parts are made up, what you see below is an accurate 3D representation of the externals of the turret. Many details are still missing,but overall we’re making good headway. If you spot any glaring inaccuracies let us know. We’ve also neared completion on the turret drive. A few details to be worked out but as it stands, the turret will turn 4 degrees per turn of the handle. The design allows for the drive to disconnect from the turret ring to freely rotate the turret if need be. This mechanism will allow a disconnect from the drive with the switch of a lever operating above. Of course, it wasn’t always easy. Learning the 3D modelling is fun, but every now and again we run into problems. Often we turn to Beckett, the lead engineer, to help solve them. Shoutout to him for having the patience to put up with the rest of us. After a seriously long day, Beckett troubleshoots a part in Solidworks on Tristan’s computer. I’m still not quite sure what he did but he fixed the problem. Armor Plates Armor plates have come a long way! While the internal framing is not yet created, having the armor plates will allow us to do so easily and quickly. See below what the hulking Panzer looks like stripped of anything useful! Even this image is already outdated, with rivet holes having been added to the engine hatches and rear topside as of this writing. Beckett has done an amazing job with the armor plates, going so far as to reach out overseas for the dimensions of the curve on the front plate. 10/10 Of course, even now the above image is outdated. Here we see Beckett working on the drivers viewports. With the classroom empty, we’ve taken over the front speakers and put on our own music. Not that Beckett knows. I wonder what he’s jammin to. Running Gear Because of the large amount of calculations and bearing requirements of the running gear, what we have to show isn’t so much on paper as it is in design. We’ve received help from a kind fellow overseas who gave us detailed images of the swingarms and suspension collars. Many thanks to you sir! Two different sources gave us images of the suspension and running gear, many thanks to you both! This is what keeps it a Grassroots Tank Project, we couldn’t do it without you! If you have any images of the tank or its parts, let us know! We do also have a 3D file of the roadwheels, as you’ll see below. It’s beginning to look sort of actually like a maybe tank? Final Drive The calculations for the final drive are nearing completion, but as with any engineering project, the closer we get to completion the more there is to do. Nate and Beckett working on linkages for the steering mechanism and final drive. It’s on the same board as some notes from class, but the show must go on. AS IT STANDS: Below is the whole shebang as we have it. We’re working on a 3D viewer to put on the website but are having trouble with it, we’ll let you know when it’s up. Goofy looking without the fenders, tracks, and everything else that we’re missing. Still, it’s beginning to look a bit like a tank! Other News Seth is working on finding land for us to put this whole project on. He’s agreed to head up that entire wing of the project, allowing us to focus on the tank itself. A huge thank you to Seth, and welcome to the team! We’re 1 step closer to a steel and iron foundry willing to help us with steel and iron castings. Details to come as we get them. Over on the Test and Test2 pages you can see us mucking about with 3D viewer plugins. Still having trouble with creating a .mtl file that shows up nicely. I like the first viewer’s smoothness but the second has the color better matched to the .mtl files. Well that’s something I’ll have to mess around with for a while. All in all, we’ve made a lot of progress, connections, and friends. We look forward to moving forward on the project, stay tuned for the next update! -T.ankmann

I have had the pleasure of talking with him over the last few months, he's been a huge help and has given us a number of resources on the chassis, but I believe his Marder was built off of a Stridsvagn M/41? Correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I'll ask him about the turret specifically (he contacted me as we were engineering the chassis/running gear).

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! (image too large, go here) Seen here are Beckett’s frame drawings and new business cards! (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”. (not a true section drawing but I just threw everything in there to give a good overview of the mechanism) 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! We've also been made aware of a project in Illinois to restore a Panzer38(t)! So we'll be heading out there sometime this spring to pay them a visit. Until next time! -T.Ankmann

Greetings, Tankers! What follows is a lengthy update, I don't mean to hit you with a wall of text with no pictures but we keep moving forward so quickly sometimes it's hard to keep you all updated! To start off, the team has partitioned the exterior parts of the tank into individual projects, Steve is driving the running gear (tracks, wheels, springs and cogs). Nate has taken control of the final drive and control linkages. Tristan heads up the turret, and Beckett embodies the chassis and armor plates. Hopefully at the end of this semester, each engineer will have completed his task and we'll be 80% through designing the [exterior of the] tank! We've also been talking to a number of salesmen and businessmen about how to present the project and plan a fundraising campaign. Next week Tristan is setting up a sit down with a career salesman to gain some insight on how the marketing world works. We are engineering majors, not marketers, so we'll need all the advice we can get on that front. We found a man willing to paint, once we get to that point. He is willing to at least let us use his equipment and he is also willing, pending an open schedule, to help us do the work. This is a wonderful development! Additionally, thanks to a very generous contact, we now have users manuals of the Jagdpanzer38(t) and the Panzer38(t), in addition to several useful pdf's on the chassis. They're all in German, so add translation to our extensive list of tasks. I'd like to add his name to this write-up but haven't gotten his go-ahead on that so I'll just give a shout-out, he knows who he is. Lastly, we have new personalized emails! A minor detail but if we all have our own business cards (ooooh hint hint maybe soon?) then it's nice to have personalized emails. Nate and Beckett's emails still need some fenangling but Steve and Tristan's are working fine. Look on the Contact page for those. So for the next week we'll be working diligently on our respective projects. As I write this, Nate is figuring out his Final Drive right-angle drive, doing the math that's required for bevel and miter gears. Beckett's working on an accurate side profile for the armor substructure, and Steve is killing his homework so he can spend the rest of the week on the chassis. We should have some screenshots of our work for you next time, stay tuned! -T.ankmann www.project38.net

Small update, working on 3D models. Larger update available here.

I'm going to start linking photo-intense posts to the blog that way you don't have to scroll through a ton of photos if you don't want to. Just stopping in to say we'll likely be at the Battle of the Bulge Reenactment event at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, USA if anybody's near there and wants to talk tanks. Right now we're working on a 3D-model that we'll print out as a working demonstration of our transmission. I'll post images when I have them on the website and facebook page.

Today was a very exciting day for us! We recieved prints made by CKD, the original manufacturer! They were in the Czech National Archives, and took about a week to get here, but at last! Some very useful information in these detail drawings. As far as I can tell, they are all hand drawn "detail" drawings, no measurements but mostly conceptual drawings, how they work and what they look like. Possibly made for a manual or maintenance bay or somesuch. Not sure. Anyway, they're pretty! I haven't put them up on the website yet, it's Finals week and pretty busy, so I'll just show you some of the pretty ones. You get the idea. These will be super helpful to us. We continue to design our own transmission, but now we have an even better idea of how theirs worked.

Hey its T.ankmann here again with a brief update! We've been putting as many hours in per day as we can on this project to get the website ready for launch come Jan 1, but you guys can get a preview. To fill everybody in, we're building a tank, the Pz38(t) Ausf. D, and in order to maintain historical accuracy we have to build the transmission from scratch. Because we can't find any Praga-Wilson gearbox, we're going to use notes and drawings and images from the original gearbox to try to build our own. We're engineering students, so call this a test of skill. As we build the drawings for the transmission, we'll post them on our “Schematics” page so that you can see the machine start to assemble. It’s all very fun. In the meantime, we've linked up with Land of Tanks to talk about our respective projects, they could help us, we can help them. I look forward to a productive partnership. They can't offer money, but they're an enthusiastic group. (Some of these .dwg files are not the final, but I wanted to give an idea of where we're at. By the end of the week we'll have the full assembly put together.)

I'll be posting once or twice a week on our build updates, right now it's mostly just research and math. More regular updates are on our webpage. http://project38.net/ we also have a Facebook at Here

I am part of a team of engineers building a Panzer 38(t), in historic detail, over the next 3 years. We're about halfway through 3d-modelling the parts and assemblies we will need to build but need some confirmation of the scale and size of it. Does anybody have locations, names, and phone numbers of Marder III's, Hetzers, or other variants on the East Coast of the United States that are accessible to the public? Essentially, I'd like to look at the chassis in detail. Crawl over it, measure it, photograph it, etc. I realize that the Hetzer had a slightly elongated and widened chassis but it would still serve to aid us in visualizing some of these parts and details better. I have heard of a Marder III build based from a Pbv301 and a Hetzer restoration project in the East Coast but haven't been able to find contact information, and the Grille down south is in semi-permanent storage Any help would be great! Thanks!

Hello! My name is, for the purpose, T.Ankmann. There is a reason for the cheesy name, because it turns out I'm a couple people! I'm Steve, I'm Tristan, I'm Beckett, I'm Nate, I'm Ben, I'm Jake. See, I'm a team enthusiastic about wwii vehicles in general and the Pz38(t) in specific. We are a group of engineering students, reenactors, and history buffs who will over the next 3 years build a Pz38(t) Ausf D! (maybe G, we havent quite finished that discussion). We saw the Hetzer build (last update 2012 ) and thought that this would be a great place to ask questions, find answers, and hang out while we build! The project is a 90% historically accurate Pz38(t), externally you won't be able to tell the difference between the real one and ours. We won't, however, be doing full armor plates unless our funding gets greatly increased, but that's a later topic. We won't even be launching for another year. Got a lot of modeling, pricing, researching, and planning to do before we give this project the green light! Anyway, I'm super happy to have found this forum, looks like there is a wealth of knowledge here and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to get to know the community! -T.Ankmann