A new show on
TLC (wednesday evenings at 9&10) in which two teams
compete to
engineer useful
STUFF made only of parts they can find within a
junkyard and within the span of a ten hour time period and without any prior
knowledge of the
challenge.
The show doesn't hand-pick the best of the
best... there is an application process that is open to any team who wants to try.
The show is originally
British, called
Scrapheap Challenge on
channel 4.
i am absolutely amazed by this show. the feats of
engineering performed are
spectacular. in the first
junkyard war i saw two, teams were to build something that could hold a person and
fly without an internal
power source. the team whose "
machine" flew the longest in 3 runs was declared the
winner.
one
team had a member who was a hobby hang glider, their natural choice was to build a simple hang glider. they found sturdy
cloth, created a
frame and joined the two.
the other team... i was sure they would
fail. they found an
airplane in their half of the
junkyard and decided to build their machine using it's
wings. no way, i thought.
no way. it's to
heavy. they still needed to add a
human to the
equation. no way would it
fly. instead of putting the
tail in the back, they built one in the front. on the wings they made
styrofoam stabilizers which also served to
steer. this was a great big hulking hunk of
metal with a
human in the middle of it. and it flew.
the teams were given the option of using a
tow rope to give them
speed, and both teams made use of it after their trial runs using
human power resulted in neither
plane getting off the ground at all, though the
glider showed much more
potential.
with the tow rope, the
glider got fairly
high, but it was
unsteady and not properly balanced and only stayed in the
air for a short time on each run, gliding nicely
down.
the
airplane. to my amazement actually got
aloft. i didn't expect it to leave the
ground. as soon as the tow rope was released, it had similar problems as the
glider.
weight and
balance made the machine unsteady, and it too stayed in the air only a few seconds.
in the end, the
glider won. each time the
airplane hit the ground again it hit fairly
hard and got a bit
damaged. but i'm still
amazed that the big hunk of scrap got off the ground.
this show is cool.
Ammendment, November 24, 2000
It's a
Junkyard Wars MARATHON! Huzzah! And it's just as good the second time, even knowing who wins the challenges. It's just so cool what smart and creative people can do with
JUNK. These are the minds that make
Mad Max of Thunderdome post-
apocalyptic people with planes and cars movies a real future possibility. This show makes me want to quit my job and go work with my hands so I have some basic skillset that would prove useful should the power someday go out.
A new season is starting soon, and preview clips are showing a
submersible vehicle. How cool is that?
I cannot recommend this show enough.
Excellent.