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Kinetic Sculpture Race 2004
YetAnotherName writes "Tom Jones again has coverage and eye-candy of the 2004 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race where engineers and artists come together, with tongues firmly in cheeks, to create land-riding, mud-crawling, sea-slogging, human-powered works of art. Amongst the winners were the Cirque de Sore Legs and La Kafkaracha."
They do the same thing here in Sweden a couple times per year. Here, the people have to build large cars, with even wings at the top, and then roll them at full speed down a large slope, which ends with a bridge, where they, looping and turning, fly (at least try to fly) down into the water from a 8 meter height. Real fun to watch :)
Forget Kinetic Races. This look more fun and more dangerous. This combines art and flying... or crashing... or something.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
These things are fun. When I was doing my undergrad in Mechanical Engineering they had some combined classes of Sculpture majors and MEs. It was a great way for the engineers to get their hands dirty and design a little more creatively, and the sculptors to learn about the real physical limits of statics and dynamics. All sorts of fun and creative little designs came from that class, and the engineers got a bit of a lesson in aesthetic design thrown in for free.
In Washington state, there is a town on the Olympic Peninsula called Port Townsend. Every year in the fall they have a Kinetic Sculpture Race.
One year I helped my friend Mike build a kinetic sculpture. His plan was to make a vehicle that could carry four people. He has welding equipment in his garage, to help with all his hobby welding, so he put together a large vehicle. The plan was for it to use car wheels and a car seat, side pontoons, and a water drive with some sort of propeller.
This vehicle looked sort of like a shuttlecraft from the original Star Trek, so Mike wound up naming it the Shuttle Distress. (This is a sort of pun on Shuttle Express, a company that takes you to the airport in minivans for less money than a taxi.)
At a costume shop, I bought a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform shirt. This is basically a very cheaply made bicycle jersey; bike jerseys are made from polypro, but don't have annoying seams or rough raspy fabric. (I was in red; that's command and navigation, right? I was in the copilot seat so it sort of works! Fortunately it wasn't an original series red shirt. "Dressed in red, soon be dead...")
We had no idea how heavy the vehicle actually was. As it turned out, just the vehicle was over 800 pounds; with Mike, me, one of his kids, and all our gear, we figured it was 1200 pounds or more easy. Well, "easy" isn't the word for pedaling that thing uphill! Fortunately Mike designed it with a really low gear ratio. We didn't set any speed records, but we got up the hill.
If you look at the pictures, you can see the swing-down pontoons on the sides. (These really look a lot like shuttlecraft engine nacelles...) That part works fine. But we ran out of time and never got any sort of propeller. The Shuttle Distress floated okay, but our fallback plan of paddling with oars just plain sucked. One of the volunteers standing by in a boat offered us a tow, which we gratefully accepted, and then of course we had to bribe the Kinetic Kops to look the other way.
It's actually normal at these events to have vehicles that can't quite perform well enough to do everything. You don't get disqualified if you can't do everything; on the contrary, there is a special award you can get if your vehicle can do everything. The "ACE" award goes to vehicles that can do the whole course without the driver having to get out. (For example, on the Shuttle Distress, you have to get out to lock the pontoons down. On ACE vehicles like Lutefisk, you can stay inside even during the land-to-water conversion.)
These events are really fun. You see some beautiful, well-built machines with clever engineering; you also see some weird things that were hacked together in a weekend with dead bicycles, random bits of foam, Barbie doll heads, and what-have-you.
If you live near one of these, go and check it out.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If you would like to see some really cool kinetic sculpture, check out Arthur Ganson's work.
http://www.arthurganson.com/pages/Sculptures.html
The Icarus Cup gathers hundreds with the same spirit... except they're flying their sculptures ! :
This event happens in october every year, here are the best pictures I could find
Check the flying effeil tower and Tintin's submarine