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Ex-WWII tanks still used as paddock bashers on Australian farms
- Chris2048 10y agoNot sure how this would replace a bulldozer, what is the purpose? Transportation?
- gtvwill 10y agoClearing land. You use them to pull ball and chain setups to clear hundreds of acres at a time
- gruez 10y agoI have a hard time visualizing that setup, are there some pictures?
- mirimir 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvfpStCs3vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvfpStCs3vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEXHm7sew3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEXHm7sew3w
- douche 10y agoWow, that is a hell of a way to clear brush
- mirimir 10y agoFor sure 8-O Creating farmland in traditional ways is very destructive. But then, permaculture was also developed in Australia :)
- mirimir 10y agoGruesome factoid: Balls and chains were a common cannon load for clearing infantry, ship sails and rigging, and other diffuse targets. So this was arguably a straightforward adaptation.
- throwanem 10y agoNot really, I think. There's no good example of scale that I can find, but those balls and chains look far too large to fit in a naval gun or a field piece, and chain shot, as a specialist dismasting load, went out with the Age of Sail in any case. (And certainly you wouldn't want to use it in anything remotely like a modern naval gun! It'd be hell on the rifling, and you can't just rebore a five-inch gun the way you can Pappy's .308.) For dealing with infantry at close range, you'd be better off with chain than with nothing, but given your druthers you'd have no reason not to prefer grape or especially canister shot, both of which are designed for specifically that purpose and would be far more effective at it. That said, if a citation exists for the idea that this kind of drag was developed from or inspired by naval chain, I'd be most interested to see it.
- mirimir 10y agoRight, cannons were never that large.
- gtvwill 10y agoYeah my old man and his brothers cleared a few thousand hectares of mallee scrub using these methods. He laughs given that they did the clearing to grow wheat when now folks are making jet fuel from mallee trees. http://www.futurefarmonline.com.au/research/new-woody-crops/sustainable-jet-fuel.htm http://www.futurefarmonline.com.au/research/new-woody-crops/... Also with the posts above mentioning aussie ingenuity I recently found our old farm sale video, over 200 vehicles, many of which were hand built ranging from big tractors to 90+ft seekers. Crazy what they built back then on-site.
- Demcox 10y agoGood post, thnx.
- ethbro 10y agoTractors -> Tanks (see Christie selling M1931s to the Soviets after the US military passed on them, shipped as the less suspicious "agricultural farm tractors") So not inconceivable to turn them back into tractors. In fact, if you shed a lot of the armor, you'd probably have a pretty decently performing vehicle, especially for the price.
- vvanders 10y agoThe armor isn't a bad thing, generally with tractors the heavier the better. It's really common to have tires filled with fluid and wheel weights for traction and stability reasons.
- 45h34jh53k4j 10y agoAnd this is the kind of aussie ingenuity that is sometimes missed by the world. Because of resource and distance, sometimes the battler needs to think creatively and repurpose what is available. Sadly as we pivot to a pure consumer society of plenty this ingenuity is no longer a necessity. (China is closer to Australia than US. Cheaper consumer goods, sometimes cheap ($<10) every day mfg goods are cheaper in AU vs US).
- yoodenvranx 10y ago> Sadly as we pivot to a pure consumer society of plenty this ingenuity is no longer a necessity I guess the necessity is still there but often you can't do anything because most products contain way to much electronics. The only thing you needed to fix an old farm tractor was a hammer, a piece of pipe and a screwdriver. But nowadays you need to study computer science before you can get such a thing running again... Or look at old TVs or audio equipment. Back in the day you could repair them yourself but nowadays it's full of non-servicable SMD parts.
- mrob 10y ago>non-servicable SMD parts It's just a matter of having the right tools, and in most cases you don't need anything expensive. A cheap Chinese hot-air rework station, some flux, and tweezers will let you service a lot of those "non-servicable" parts. People tend to overestimate the difficulty of surface mount soldering simply because the parts are small. In many cases it's actually easier than through hole because surface tension does so much of the work for you. You don't need perfect alignment. BGAs are admittedly more difficult but even those can be replaced with cheap/improvised tools if you're sufficiently dedicated. In the old days tools were more expensive and we didn't have easily accessible video tutorials for most common repairs. I think a bigger reason for the decline of repair is the lower costs of replacement products.
- dogma1138 10y agoA soldering station isn't the problem, but you don't want to do SMD with a cheap chinese one you'll ruin your components if the temp control is off. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to get schematics for most devices, and I'm not even talking about legally since you'll have to do it illegally for virtually any device any how. Many SMD components are not marked at all, which means that if some tiny SMD component gets fried you can't even know what it was for sure not to mention it's value without having another board to measure. Not to mention that with 402 and 603 sized packages becoming more and more common goodluck soldering those at home even with professional kits, these are 0.4MM packages, sure 1608 and even 1005 are doable by a steady hand but anything smaller and you likely won't even be able to see the damage on the board. And without schematics you can't really debug anything, you might be able to reverse some of the boards but anything beyond 2-3 layers is impossible to RE by hand without an x-ray scattering machine. And then we get into active components and custom chips which are either impossible to get hold off without cannibalization or would cost you more to buy even in bulk on digikey or any other store than the devices you attempt to fix. Sure a 2000$ Macbook is worth a 400$ fix, but a 50$ controller board doesn't.
- douche 10y agoOn the History (haha) Channel show Ax Men, there was one season were one of the crews was using a yarder rig mounted on an old M4 Sherman chassis. My dad has also told me some stories about converted surplus tanks used as bulldozers and half-tracks skidders back when he was starting out logging in the 70s, before there was a lot of really specialized equipment.
- vvanders 10y ago6 gallons of diesel an hour, uf da. Our little 2-cyl Ford 1500 CUT has a 5 gallon tank and uses half a gallon an hour. Curious if they ever tried to rig a 3pt hitch in one of those.
- userbinator 10y agoYou should compare them to bulldozers; a quick search reveals that they use just as much fuel: http://farmingforum.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?4846-Fuel-consumption-of-Cat-D8-Cat-D6 http://farmingforum.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?4846-Fuel-co...
- vvanders 10y agoOh I'm well aware that they aren't equivalent, out little Ford is only ~25hp at the crank :).
- countingteeth 10y agowell, that wasn't as alarming as "one down the shed there that'll use 13 litres of petrol every hundred yards." I hope it is moving a lot of dirt in those 100 yards.
- Demcox 10y agoThat is just awesome. I love how they utilize old war machines, which was build to destroy, to create life and provide food! Even though it has crazy poor fuel/range ratio, it has outlastet the CO2 footprint is initially made.
- dmoy 10y agoGood to see old stuff still useful. Up here in Seattle we use old M60 tanks to shoot the mountains for snow clearance in the winter.
- marssaxman 10y agoIt's always fun to baffle visitors from other states by bragging that our highway department is better-armed than their highway department.
- r00fus 10y agoThe proverbial swords to plowshares. Reminded of a very powerful mtg card...
- azernik 10y agoMisleading headline - according to the article body itself, the tanks were used as bulldozers in the immediate post-war period when they were cheaper than purpose-made bulldozers. What's going on now is that farmers that own tanks from that period are acquiring, restoring, maintaining, and running them in their original military configurations for historical reasons. Which is still super cool.
- cryptozeus 10y agoBatrock international :)
- crypto5 10y agoSoviet WW2 T-34 is still in use in Syria and Yemen nowdays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OoS8Zhg6EM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OoS8Zhg6EM
- h4nkoslo 10y agoAustralia is kind of interesting in that it has a lot of preconditions for success (relatively high IQ & conscientiousness, high levels of social cohesion, stable governing institutions, good education, high social & human capital in general) but just an enormously spread-out geography, both internally and externally, and a relatively tiny population. It ends up with a really odd economic dynamic where they have to leverage their internal resources because, eg, it's simply too much of a PITA to get a particular rare part shipped from a hemisphere away (from a supplier that isn't really set up to routinely ship to them anyway because it's not a huge market), and yet they actually end up being pretty good at it.