Proving Ground!

On Saturday March 30th members of the UK Tank Club assembled 'somewhere in England' to build a Tank assault course or Proving Ground! We are in debt to our fellow member Peter Shaw for allowing us to build our tank proving ground on some of his land in deepest darkest West Sussex here in the UK. A contingent of 'navvys' turned up armed with spades, shovels and the like to do battle with the land and within a few hours an assault course was born! Here we have a few pictures showing the (inexperienced) builder's work and some pictures of my Panther doing a very good impression of a bulldozer! If you think there's too many pictures of my Panther, don't blame me 'cos I was driving, blame the photographer Howard! I'll try and get a rough plan drawn up and post that on this page so you can see the layout of the course.


This is the water splash (yes I know there's no water in it!) but it did start to fill later in the day all on it's own.	This bridge was made from pieces of railway track from Peters outdoor railway.	As you can see this bridge has been here a while and was incorporated into the course.	This one as well. No challenge this as it's a lot wider than the tanks.	Just to prove that there were other models present that day, here's Jim Cusworth's excellent (until Mark Spencer, the Mechanical Butcher, got hold of it!) 1/6th TigerI.

Oh look what a lovely model, it's Stuart's wonderful Panther surprise surprise.	Look at the travel on the suspension in this shot.	Careful Stuart or you'll be after Mark for another gun barrel.	I wasn't sure I should have done this but Mark Spencer did it with Jim's Tiger so I thought I'd have a go.	You can just make out a piece of pondweed hanging off the machine gun in this picture, that's how deep the water was!

And back again just for good measure.	I love this picture! For me it's the best picture of the day and sums up what model tanking is all about-mud plugging!	Up we go. I was most impressed with the Panthers performance doing this kind of thing. It has a lower gear ratio than the JagdPanther which gives it much more oomph!	This was my idea, to build a shallow trench which zig zags along behind some bushes.	And back again. This trench soon became a mud bath as water seeped out of the surrounding ground.

Here we see the Panther powering up out of the water splash.	And carefully over the top. It's important to take it easy with these models climbing up out of ditches and the like because they tend to crash down onto the front axles if you're not careful.	Who left all these holes here?	And you have to be careful driving into ditches as well as you can bend/break the gun barrels, as I well know!	Here's a nice close up shot crossing the rail built bridge. Look at all that mud!

And back the other way.	'Hey come and have a look at what I've found, I think it's a Tiger Turret!'	Humpy and Johnny looking at it!	Mark Spencer after he repaired the strimmer!	Howard, Peter and Jim hard at it.