Something that I have always been curious about. If one of the team members could respond, that would be sweet. What would happen at the end of the ten hours one of the teams just hasn't completed anything? I think its pretty remarkable that both teams on every episode have built some kind of working machine. I realize there is some "tweaking" time allowed on the day of testing, but how much are they willing to stretch the time limit? Is there an archive somewhere of failure episodes?

-- Matt Bagshaw (cadman88@hotmail.com), January 10, 2001

Answers

dp covered some of this in the NERDS FAQ. Considering the amount of money put into taping of a show, they aren't going to strictly enfore the time limits if they don't have two semi-functioning machines. Failure during the trial is OK as it makes for interesting TV, but first and foremost this is a TV show, costing lots of money to film. Failure isn't good for the budgets.

-- Michael (Canadian P. Eng) (Michael@mks-tech.com), January 10, 2001.

This is Waddy, with the "Three Rusty Juveniles", the team that built the "Amce Punkin' Musket #1" for the Jan 3rd. show. (Yes, punkin is not the way to spell pumpkin, but that is the way the "World Championship Punkin Chunkin Assn." spells it to give identity to their brand of insanity.) punkinchunkin.com While doing the machine building, each of the team members is asked to repeat almost every detail of what they do, so the camera person at their shoulder can get the moves on tape. The teams actually get what would about ten hours of continuous forward moving activity, but it is streched somewhat, as you can see by the sky in the background. The team members use this "please repeat that move" time to think ahead while doing the repeat moves on "auto pilot". For the cannon build, I went in with a plan in my head, and we ended up with a totally different looking and working system, not even close to what I though we would have. I tried to allow the team the freedom to do their own designing, which was in part dictated by the materials that our scroungers could find, and recommended things that I thought would work, drawing on my experience. The bike parts power pack was designed by Jay and Tom, with help from Ray when the assembly started. The tranny was my idea, so that we would have a choice of pedal resistance without using a chain changer system should we need to pump to higher pressures. There were some things that were obvious, like the valve, barrell, and tank were essential parts. They just didn't look like what we had in mind at he beginning of the build. We had to go with the tank(pipe) that the beach boys used, because it had been pressure tested for safety, and we were not allowed to build our own tank from things that we though would look good or be simple to work with. They absolutely must end up with two working machines to have a competetion, which is the reason for building the machines, so they have to fix it if there is a problem, by using the interim day between the build and trials day. There are no failures, but only one team from each show can continue on the the next level, and there are a lot of factors involved in the outcome. It's a pain when it rains, especially for welding, but stopping for the rain is not an option. Hope this will fill in the blanks for you.

-- Waddy Thompson (cthomp3851@aol.com), January 10, 2001.

Thanks Waddy

-- Aaron M. Brown (jude570@ctcn.net), January 11, 2001.