About us
Tanknutdave.com is an online Encyclopaedia web source, about tracked and wheel based military vehicles, known as the A - Z of armoured vehicles. The site has attracted the attention of well respected historians, authors and industry specialists such as Richard Stickland, Paul Moorcraft, David Foster, Rob Griffin,Malcolm Cleverly and the BBC. The site is supported by many current and former serving tank crewmen from around the world including diggers in Australia.
The site attracts on average 1500+ hits per day.
History
The site was the brain child of David Williams as a joint project with his long term friend Dave Wright, better known as TankNutDave (pictured above), who was a keen enthusiast about military vehicles and modeller, who had a small site dedicated to his model collection.
Whilst David was responsible for the technical side of the site, Dave was the one who wrote about the vehicles and created the content. Dave is an advisor for the Citizens Advice Bureau. He also hosts other military related websites, photographs military vehicles and works part time as a driving instructor on British Army FV432 APC's for Tanks-A-Lot which is a private tank/AFV driving experience company based in the UK.
The site was later joined by a British Army NCO who served in the Royal Armoured Corps during Operation’s Telic and Herrick, known only as "2nd Tankie". Not only writing about British vehicles, he screens the site for possible breeches in OpSec.
What makes us different
The sites success came about from the break away of the traditional web source use of text and photographs, with the integration of embedded youtube video’s and the opportunity for crews of tanks and other vehicles to contribute information with a level of anonymity.
Other key features was the decision to build vehicle menu’s that listed vehicles by their type and country of origin with pictures, so that users who did not know the name of a vehicle could find it, making the site more user friendly.
Contents for the articles are sourced directly from vehicle manufacturers, reputable publications, and institutions such as The Tank Museum Bovington and servicemen from around the world.
3rd party use
The site has been used as a source for other online military sites and publications (including wikipedia) as well as media companies. The site was selected by The Tank Museum Bovington to record footage of behind the scenes at Tankfest and publish it on youtube. We have also helped vehicle manufacturers such as BAE (in the UK) and private vehicle collectors based in the UK, USA, Israel, Germany and Australia with research and information on vehicles.
So far during 2011, the site has assisted Paul Moorcraft with his latest book, assisted letscrushit.com with photographing their events and worked with the BBC on a new forthcoming TV Show. We are always happy to help 3rd parties.
How to follow us
The site has a youtube account, that has several hundred uploaded videos and attracted (as of August 2011) over 2,971,986 upload viewings (and growing) as well as a twitter feed for publishing announcements of new articles on the site.