RC Paintball Tank Built From Printer Parts

rc paintball tank

You could spend hours exploring the R/C Tank Combat website, so we will highlight one project to get you started. Steve Tyng built this awesome model based on the Russian T34-85 tank. The body is all wood an uses stainless steel axles salvaged from a printer. The original drive system used 24-volt DC motors from dot-matrix printers, but they’ve since been replaced. The most tedious part of this build appears to be the tracks which are made from a treadmill belt sandwiched between wooden blocks. The turret rotates and the barrel can elevate as well. The entire turret package can be easily removed. Inside is a cheap paintball gun that has been lightened and has a small RC servo bolted on to depress the trigger. Definitely have a look at the Maryland Attack Group’s other projects like their field artillery and armoured cars.

[thanks Jason]

16 thoughts on “RC Paintball Tank Built From Printer Parts

  1. Perfect…now to combine one of these with one of the robotics hacks…and make an army of autonomous paintball tanks ;)

    If that doesn’t scream small-time evil genius, I don’t know what does!

  2. Oh and dont forget the sentry gun: http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000427059760/ swap paintball for airsoft and if anyone treads near your area they get a new color of armor.

    On the other hand is this a bit obsessive. I have gone and played paintball. What happened to shooting each other while running around in the woods. Its a neat hack and sounds like fun.

    BTW. Can it play music??
    http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000453045067/

  3. I was kind of disappointed that the only printer part on there was the monster dc motors. They must have come out of a line printer. I suppose somewhere you can still get a line printer, but they were monsters. A while back, those motors were very common on ebay. Not so much any more. I usually strip the motors out of printers before I throw them away, but even a fairly large printer is going to have tiny motors in comparison to the ones in this hack.

  4. The originial motors came out of two 80’s vintage Dataproducts dot matrix printers. They were the print head motors. Like the originial poster stated they have since been replaced. The axles are still there and these were the linear slides that the print heads slide back and forth on. Other componets from the printers were used in the barrel elevate mechanism.

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