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More Junkyard Wars
A reader writes: "Junkyard Wars is quite possibly the only thing on TV that is cooler than Battlebots (I loved the one where they build a hang-glider).
Wired reports that TLC has taken registrations from potential teams, and is going to do another season."
http://www.junkyard-wars.com/
anyone want to start a slashdot team on it?
maybe not... nothing would get done, only people talking about how to get linux to run on it.
-| My other ride is your mom |-
Goes by the name of Scrapheap Challenge, and it's presented by Robert Llewellyn, aka Kryten out of Red Dwarf. I've yet to see it but a friend (who lives in a house full of other engineers and architects) tells me it's a blast.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
...of Red Green's sage advice: To achieve any great goal, one must bring along duct tape.
My favorite highlight of last season's Junkyard Wars was the all-terrain vehicle that had a cannon that shot a boat anchor to winch itself out of bogs. Slap THAT sucker on the front of your Battlebot and the Gold Nut is yours, hands down!
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
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Don't forget the duct tape. It holds the universe together...
Double J. Strictly for the . . .
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
At least not that I have ever seen.
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I found it in time for the last three or four shows. I would love to watch it again from the beginning to see what I missed. CBS is rerunning the whole Survivor saga so I don't know why TLC doesn't do the same for Junkyard Wars. If they are lacking the room they can please drop the Christopher Loser show. I want to see a boat made from a car, not a cabinet door made from chicken wire.
Also, this brings up an interesting tagent, why is it that no network seems to understand the value of continuity? How many times have you wanted to start watching a show, but felt it wasn't worth the bother since you had missed so much and wouldn't understand it? Why is it so damn rare that you ever see a marathon of one show running in the proper airdate sequence. I think right now down in Australia, one of the networks is running non-stop Simpsons episodes in this fashion.
I pray for the day that devices like TiVo and ReplayTV make it possible to truly have an entire channel dedicated to a certain show. I just pisses me off that even when such a device becomes practical, there is the little matter of it taking me ten years for all of the various episodes to show up on the air so I can record them.
I'll quit now before I get further off tangent. By the way, has anyone else notices that 90% of the work seems to be done in the last 15 minutes? It starts out and they are drawing on the board for an hours...so see breaks for lunch...by the time you get to the final hour there is like 50% completion on the project. A little careful editting and suddenly the damn thing is complete. I think it's a bit faked myself because a lot of the competitions end up being pretty close...which some of those contraptions are so horrid you would think the competition would be an absolute blowout.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
As a side note, the two major cps programs out there are Destination Imagination and Odyssey of the Mind The programs are pretty similar. Take a team of 7 or less kids or college students, give them an open ended problem to solve, and have the present the solution on a Saturday competition. The presentations generally include technical portions, as well as a skit, about 10 minutes in length, along with scenery and the like. The competition also include an on the spot portion, where you're given a problem to do in about 10 minutes from beginning to end. Again, creativity is highly stressed. Not exactly geek culture, but I strongly encourage people to go check out either program and volunteer to help out as a judge or something.
I agree about simplicity winning as a rule, but that battle was closer than you made out.
;)
Y'see, if you make a floating crane it has to be _very_ stable and well balanced, or it'll capsize. Theirs wasn't, and very nearly did.
I'd actually contend that the buoyancy tank system would have worked better _if_ we had intelligent people running it. As it was, if you remember the challenge, they panicked and took a stupid decision for how to maneuver the tanks. Meant they had to pump for ages, slowing them down and breaking the pump... Stupid, as they had ballast on the tanks which they could have gently released to raise them as opposed to pumping extra air in.
Fundamentally, though, simplicity and bikers will normally win. Simplcity gives you less to build and less to break, while bikers are used to building strange contraptions from scrap and the like. Look at any trike for proof
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Is the yard "salted"? Depends on what you mean by "salted".... They do make sure that a grand excess of random parts to make do are available. But there's no pre-defined set of detail plans; I've seen what the "experts" planned out for us in one of our Challenges: there were three different ideas, each one on one sheet of lined notebook paper, no details, no dimensions.... and our result looked like nothing on any of these three "expert's plans".
Some of the most "fun" challenges have been where a critical part is intentionally _purged_ from the 'heap- the challenge becomes to construct that critical mechanism from random iron, and get it to work!
Improvization is absolutely key on the 'heap. I can't emphasize this enough. With ONE exception (safety-related equipment), you will NOT find ANY of your key parts "brand new, in box, with doc set" on the heap. What you will find are numerous broken vehicles, trashed appliances, industrial and construction junk, and machine-shop cutoffs/remnants, which may or may not have been placed on the heap because of the challenge, and may or may not have a functional whateveritis you were looking for. (we know that they in general do _NOT_ clean the 'heap out of helpful bits, because we found previous challenger's machine parts on the 'heap )
The "Experts" are people who've worked with purpose-made machinery in their area of expertise for literally decades. Back in their shops, they have all the proper parts, the right tools and alloys, testing equipment, CAD software, the whole shebang. In short, they have the tools, they have the technology. BUT NONE of that is available on the Scrapheap. The Experts themselves have to learn to scavenge and improvise; anything you can't find or manufacture yourself does not exist, even if you have half a dozen of them back in the stockroom at the company (yes, I've seen an expert nearly tearing their hair out in just this situation).
Bearings have to be scavenged; we ripped some out of a Moped. Need a bigger bearing, with a strong shaft? Use a steering knuckle and CV joint off that crashed Citroen. Box girder? If you can't find cutoffs from someone elses project, cut them out of that shed roof. Heavy electrical cable? Scavenge it from one of the big junked excavators.
The ONE EXCEPTION - wherever safety on the set or British safety law (the equivalent of OSHA) is involved, new parts and tools are always salted. For example, safety valves are always new, freshly tested, with certification papers up in the Director's cupola. If you manage to scavenge a safety-related part that isn't one of the certificated ones, an assistant director will let you know- and won't let you build using the unsafe part- they'll send you back out onto the heap with a hint on where to find the safe part that does the same job.
We aren't allowed to change our own grinding wheel or cutoff disks, for the same reason (they have to be spin tested before use, in a safe area). Explosives and high-flammability materials (and fuel tanks) are likewise covered and there are a platoon of Britain's Finest Firemen standing by for the whole day, as well as paramedics and an ambulance, Just In Case (and my thanks to them!).
By it's nature, the show can be dangerous and everyone on set, contestant or not, has to be on gaurd all the time. There hasn't been a serious injury yet (sprains and strains, that's all), and everyone on the show works to keep it that way. Even if it messes up continuity (and you can see this occasionally, where safety gaurds get added to a machine after "TIME" is called) a safety issue trumps any other consideration of the show.
Hope this helps...
-Dr. Crash (Captain, NERDS, season 3)
Iron Chef.
Hmm.. Maybe I should actually get cable. Maybe. I'd really like to see this show, but I'd probably never turn the TV off if we did get cable.
On a random note -- the Minneapolis/St. Paul area apparently only has about 50% penetration with cable. IIRC, most areas are much higher (70-80% or something).
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Ski-U-Mah!
I am Jeff, organizer of the first US team to compete, and the one interviewed by Wired. Crash is a teammate. The TLC site is fairly low on content currently. I suggest either our site or the Channel 4 TV site which includes some neat time-lapse photography of the workshops as the machines come together.
TLC is planning to show more episodes of the british show in the late fall and early winter. (the schedule isn't final yet, so I can't give a more exact date). In Jan/Feb, they will broadcast an Americanized version of the show. No they didn't dumb it down. Its the same crew, same pile of junk, and comparable challenges. The big difference will be in the accents of the contestants and they replaced Robert with an American comic.
Yes, it is a real pile of scrap. On the other side of the wall from the set, are Cockneys in large cranes, that end in claws, literally tossing cars thru the air. Like a good yard, the stuff is partially sorted, on one side is a pile of wood and other construction debris (the wood is "experienced" most of the plywood had clearly been a concrete form in its first life). Next comes ex plumbing, and electrical conduit. Cars in various degrees of flattened are piled forming the odd aisle, then the ventilation/hvac stuff. Off to the other side starts some of the more serious industrial scrap. there is a 20 foot pile of very rusted 1-2" wire rope, next to what must have been a large liquid storage tank (20' diameter, guessing from the curve in the 8' square sections of 1" plate steel) There is the twisted remains of some conveyor systems (a great source of chain and bearings), and other large machines, including what looks like the yard's now-deceased former car crusher. Closer to the workshops, are some of the more unusual vehicles, including a well tagged ex- tourbus, and some military surplus truck based device that seems to be a large collection of hydraulic bits.
Even when parts are seeded for a particular purpose, there is no guarantee that they will attach to anything else. To use one of the already broadcast shows, "power pullers", there were apropriate tires in the pile. There were no differentials that fit said tires however, and one of the challenges to using the good (lugged) tires, was how to get them to mate with the differential you found.
-dp-
Organizer:New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society;The NERDS,first US team in the UK Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars