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In today's edition of Boing Boing Video, guest-host Todd Lappin explores a massive collection of historical military vehicles tanks collected by an eccentric Silicon Valley multimillionaire. The recently-departed Jacques Littlefield amassed one of the world's largest and most significant collections of this type, and his collection is now overseen by the nonprofit Military Vehicle Technology Foundation. Snip from their description:
Our goal is to acquire, restore, and interpret the historical significance of 20th and 21st century military vehicles. Domestic and foreign combat vehicles such as tanks, armored cars, self-propelled artillery, and other technically interesting mobile platforms are the focus of the collection. We also maintain an extensive technical library that describes many vehicles down to the part level. Aside from the vehicles, there are towed artillery, antitank, and antiaircraft guns. Military support equipment, inert ordnance, and accessories round out the collection.
The foundation is supported by public donations, and you can make one at their website if you dig what they do. To make arrangements for tours, you can email tours.mvtf at gmail.com. To arrange access to the collection for commercial purposes: permissions.mvtf at gmail.com.
The "tank tour" BBV shot for this episode was organized by BB pal Karen Marcelo and Dorkbot SF. They put on interesting events like this every month! Karen says,
June, 2009 is the 7 year anniversary of dorkbotSF. We have two cool events coming up, hope the some of the Boing Boing readers will come out for them! First one is jun 3 – at Greg Leyh's lightning lab. A live demo of scaled-down model of greg's 12-story Tesla coils, debut of Marc Powell's new software, and cool light printer from Jonathan Foote.
Then Jon Sarriugarte is hosting a big bash on the 20th! snail car, muffin cars, tesla roadster makers, fireworks, omega recoil's tesla coils, blacksmithing, etc. and he said more surprises he doesnt want to mention in advance!
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(Thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to shooter-producer extraordinaire Eddie Codel and to our host Todd Lappin.)
