Gettysburg 2008

On Saturday we held our fall battle courtesy of Joe's family friends in Gettysburg. It was a glorious fall day,cloudy with chance of rain with occasional sun, perfect tank weather. Here are a few pics of the group and Joe's new vehicle, the X2.

I would post some video but for some reason I only have sound with a dark screen when I download it to my computer. Very bizarre. So I guess we'll have to rely on Steve Tyng's footage aboard the Cromwell.

We had 4 half hour engagements, all involving blowing open the door to the casino, getting the gold,( a fairly good size rock),and carrying it back to base on the tank. I'll let Frank fill in the details, but I will mention that the quick loading ammo hatch on the Comet made a very handy gold carrier. Twice.

Operational Notes:
All of the problems from the spring battle were fixed during the summer rebuild. New sprockets for the M1 were made so that motor and drive axle now matched. An aluminum base was added to the motor mount to lessen the torque flex of the motors. Also, two very thick wedges finished the job. My experiment of adding small rubber strips to act like mini cogs performed without a problem. It was quite nice to maneuver freely about the field . The terrain did not matter, I actually had better traction in the tall bocage area of the field. The M1's low amp draw allowed me to go an entire hour on one set of 26 AH. And they were my older set.

But of course something did have to go amiss, it would not be a battle otherwise. After the first hour of battling, I switched in a new set of batteries. The tank would not move. Tried another set, same problem. After some testing, thanks to Frank, believe it or not my heavy duty connectors were not allowing power to reach the motors. A new set seemingly solved the problem, except that it happened again near the end of the 3rd half hour. Further expert testing, jiggling the wires around, showed that the couplings needed some tension to maintain the connection. It's possible that the new connectors purchased may have slight enough differences from the originals and allows the contacts to separate inside the housing.

All in all it was a great day.