Handymen often choose to make furniture, do DIY, or fix up old cars, but for Kameron Swinney, 34, of Sacramento, California, The challenge was to build a battle tank or tank from scratch. of the World War Ia French Renault FT17.
“When I was 15, my uncle taught me how to weld,” he said. “From there, I did blacksmith work, I built fences and gates, but I also welded classic cars“Swinney told Newsweekwhere he expressed that he is also passionate about history, so with this project he united his two passions.
Fascinated by the technological advances of the first great war, “whether they were machine guns, planes or tanks“, he dedicated himself to building his own battle tank, the first to be used in battle and which marked a before and after.
“It was arguably the most successful tank of the First World War and is considered the grandfather of the modern tank, as it was the first with a fully rotating turret and a drive train at the rear completely separate from the crew. It is a design that all current tanks continue to use,” he pointed out.
So, he invested between 1,200 and 1,400 hours in assembling his FT17, in which he also had to spend $50,000 (about 46,000 euros) in metal sheets up to just over 1 centimeter thick, tractor engines, chains (which weigh about a ton), hydraulic system…
Of course, the machine gun that mounts the turret, completely rotating as in the original design, is not operational, as it would contravene local weapons control laws. In fact, You can currently only drive the vehicle within private propertyso he hopes to soon be able to use it in recreations and exhibitions about history.
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