Drifting A Tank

Drifting A Tank – The Essential Guide for Men The Manual is simple — we show men how to live a life that is more engaged. As our name implies, we offer a suite of expert guides on a wide range of topics, including fashion, food, drink, travel, and grooming.

We don’t boss you around; we’re simply here to bring authenticity and understanding to all that enriches our lives as men on a daily basis. When choosing your driftwood to use in your tank, never go to an ocean, river, lake, or pond and take random wood from there.

Drifting A Tank

Obviously, taking driftwood from the ocean means that it will have salt embedded in the wood. When you place the wood in a freshwater tank, you will be introducing the salt to the freshwater which won’t harm fish (in small amounts), but it will kill freshwater plants.

Buy Your Driftwood

Even if you take wood from a freshwater river or lake, it could contain parasites that could be deadly to your tank inhabitants. Another thing you want to notice is if they list the driftwood as “aquarium safe”.

Some wood sold for lizards and other reptiles may be covered in chemicals that benefit the lizards, but will hurt fish. This is just one more reason to buy from a reputable source. I always buy my driftwood from a reputable seller.

I have bought a nice piece of Malaysian driftwood (shown above) from my local fish store for $12 and a smaller piece from Drs. Foster and Smith for $6 or so. Another great place to look online is eBay since most sellers have a “What You See Is What You Get” system, but eBay is considerably more expensive than most fish stores and other websites.

I climb into the driver’s hatch of the FV433, and Borglum sits atop the armor just behind me. Instead of a steering wheel, you hold two levers. Pulling on one side slows the tread, so that the vehicle skews in that direction.

Soak The Wood For A Couple Of Days

Tenderly I nurse the gas pedal and creep forward, acutely aware of the vast bulk I’m now directing. I make a few turns and carefully accelerate to walking speed. This doesn’t feel like rumbling along in a car—it’s more like grinding through a thick plank with a circular saw.

After my own head-to-head with the Probe, I climb down and find the old Ford is now about a foot high and lodged under the tank’s right rear tread. Carefully, so as not to catch debris under the tank’s mudguard, Borglum backs the Chieftain off the car and returns it to the garage.

An employee drives up in a forklift to haul the carcass away. Nothing remains but an oil stain, a scattering of glass and plastic, and the surge of raw power still tingling in my hands. I’m a big fan of the “natural” aquarium look with a lot of plants, rocks, driftwood, moss, etc.

Anything plastic makes your tank look tacky and Walmart-like, so driftwood is one step in the right direction. It is not only a food source for animals like plecos and shrimp, but it makes the tank look ten times prettier.

Boil For – Hours Optional But Recommended

Following these simple guidelines will ensure that your driftwood will be added to your aquarium safely in a way that will not disturb the water chemistry or your fish. I trundle along a maze of dirt roads, gaining confidence and speed until I’m approaching this vehicle’s max speed of 18 mph.

Launching up a small hill, I come over the crest and find myself heading onto an iced-over pond. After decades of driving in the Northeast, I know how this is going to play out: the skid, the spin, the sideways crash.

But now the tank comes down, smashes through the ice, water goes flying, and we go rolling along, right on course. It’s a frosty, bright November morning in rural Minnesota, and the 60-ton battle tank is rumbling heartily, like a big metal cat ready for the hunt.

My head is poking out of the driver’s hatch, beneath the 22-foot-long cannon barrel. This beast, an ’80s British Chieftain, was designed to tear up the toughest, most advanced armor the Soviet Union could throw into battle.

Add Driftwood To Tank

Opposing me, 30 feet away, sits a 15-year-old Ford Probe. This moment of mechanical omnipotence has come courtesy of Drive A Tank, an internal-combustion fantasy camp founded five years ago by a heavy-equipment contractor named Tony Borglum.

I arrived yesterday in the small town of Kasota and met with the 26-year-old at his garage, a hangar-like space crammed with military vehicles: two enormous tanks, a couple of self-propelled guns, an assortment of armored personnel carriers

, and a vintage Jeep mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun. Some countries may be less heavily armed. Jeff Wise is a contributing editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger.

For a daily dose of extreme fear, .css-3wjtm9{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.125rem;text-decoration-color:#1c6a65;text-underline- offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-3wjtm9:hover{color:#595959;text-decoration -color:border-link-body-hover;}check out his blog. Now you will want to add your driftwood to a large bucket and soak it for 5-7 days. This will allow the water to saturate the wood (making it sink when you add it to the tank), encourage more tannins out of the wood, and ensure us that it is 100% safe to add to your tank.

When I soak my driftwood, I normally put it in a large bucket in the garage and change the water every 1 or 2 days. I toggle the gearshift with my left foot, push the release button atop a pair of levers used for steering, and press the gas pedal.

The behemoth eases forward like a land-bound battleship, the treads clanking with a near-musical chime. Fifteen feet to go. Ten. Five. A part of my brain, conditioned by years of careful driving, starts screaming, Warning! Collision imminent!

And then I’m lurching upwards to the sound of crunching and shattering. As I settle back towards level again, I set the brakes, climb out of the hatch, and clamber down to assess the damage. Drive A Tank’s daylong sessions—which are priced starting at $400—begin with a classroom discussion on vehicle operations.

After class the 20 to 30 students in attendance start out in machines such as a 33,000-pound vehicle called the FV433 Abbot. It’s tanklike, with half-inch-thick armor and a 14-foot-long cannon barrel, but Borglum explains almost apologetically that it’s technically not a tank but a self-propelled artillery piece.

(However, I bet if you drove it up the White House driveway, your obituary would refer to the vehicle as a tank.) It’s not the size and power of military vehicles that appeals to Borglum as much as their sheer orneriness.

“With a Caterpillar or a John Deere, they try to build things in a way that makes sense,” he says. “With the military stuff, it’s like if they can stick something on somewhere and it fits, that’s where they stick it on. It’s like they go out of their way to make it a pain in the ass.”

Borglum’s father has a concrete-recycling business, and the family is used to running large equipment and machining parts. This expertise came in handy when, in 2006, Borglum and his father decided it would be fun to start collecting British army vehicles.

There’s a small community of collectors in the United States, so the men didn’t have a hard time tracking down machines from around the globe, each one costing somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000. “I’m used to running excavators that can grab a 40,000-pound rock and drag it out of a hole,” Borglum says.

“So driving a tank is light work. It’s just an armored box on tracks—no different than a dozer.” After hours of practice, I’ve earned the main course: my moment of glory in the Chieftain. This is undeniably a real tank, a mountain of metal whose scale is hard to get your head around.

Based on the initial cost and the amount of gas it guzzles, Borglum says it costs him $1000 an hour to run. Worse, if it suffers a major breakdown, he may never be able to get it back into working operation.

So he’s as cautious with the tank as a teenager coddling his first pony car. All he’ll ever let a customer do with the Chieftain is drive it forward a few dozen yards, which wouldn’t be very interesting unless you were doing something novel, like flattening a car.

If your driftwood is small enough to fit into some kind of pot, boil it on your stove for an hour or two. This will encourage bad toxins, parasites, and tannins out of the wood. You will want to change the water every 30 minutes.

If your wood is too large to fit into any normal sized kitchen pot, then you can skip this step and move onto the next one. Aquarium Watch is intended to provide you with all the information needed for both beginners and advanced fish keepers.

We review fish tanks, equipment, plants, and a whole lot more. We also give advice on fishkeeping, setup and more. We head out to play on the Borglums’ 24 acres of woodland. The principles of driving the tank couldn’t be simpler, but getting a feel for it takes a while.

Visibility is severely limited. Where exactly the sides of the vehicle are is a matter of pure speculation. From the condition of the bark on most of the trees, I can tell I’m not the first one to encounter this issue.

After you have boiled and/or soaked your driftwood for the proper amount of time, you can add it to your aquarium. I always suggest thinking about abstract ways to place it in beyond the normal horizontal position.

The piece I have pictured above was originally intended to be an aquascape tree with Java Moss on top, but it was too large to stand vertically in my 10 gallon tank. Be creative and be unique!

Always remember that you can add plants like mosses, and Java Fern to the wood to give it an even more natural look.

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