Managing the Tower (Part 2)

Part 2: Construction

After collecting cans you're going to want to start building some towers! But how big a tower can you build with the cans that you have available? What shape should you go for? 

We opted for a triangular based pyramid as it proved far more stable than the square base. To work out how many cans you need boils down to just adding up some triangle numbers (or, alternatively, knowing your tetrahedral numbers!). Of course with a spreadsheet this becomes very easy, and it also helps with keeping a count of the cans as the number you collect grows beyond a reasonable size (you wouldn't want to have to count 1000 odd cans from scratch to check if there were enough!)

So once you've got the cans and you know exactly what you'll be building you can move onto actually building it. If you have cans of different sizes like us then you'll need to be careful with how you distribute them - obviously you need to keep cans of the same height on the same layer or your tower is not going to stand! Here's how we go about planning each construction... and surprise surprise, it involves the spreadsheet again!:

 

The numbers in bold at the bottom are triangle numbers representing how many cans should be on each layer. The number just above is a sum of the cans you've put into that layer so far so its easy to see if you've overshot it or need to add more. As you fill in cans in the middle we made it so that the number gets subtracted from the leftmost column and added to the rightmost. This example is for a 13 storey tower and so the total needs to reach 455 (bottom right). The rows marked in a pale red are the 500ml cans, which are distinguished from the others due to the difference in height.

Whether you decide to plan yours like us or just go for it, now all you need is a place to build it! Try to find a place that's flat and has room for the tower to grow. You want there to be as much ceiling space as possible (ours is around 3m high), and you also don't want it to be a place where people are likely to knock the tower down by accident! 

As the tower gets larger it will also get more unstable, and so if your floor isn't perfectly even you might want to make some kind of makeshift base to make things easier. We got 3 large pieces of card from Hobbycraft to make ours:

You'll need a steady hand (and, later on, quite a bit of patience) to build a beer can pyramid since once empty the cans are extremely light. Building beyond 14 storeys or so you may also need a chair or stepladder in order to place the top few layers! 

Once it's built that concludes the second step, and you can sit back and admire your work as you drink more cans in order to build something even bigger!

Managing the Tower (Part 1)

This post will be the first of many behind-the-scenes peeks at what goes into managing our beer can tower project. In part it will be a way of conveying the amount of hidden effort involved, but it should also serve as a pretty thorough guide should anyone reading want to create a tower of their own! And so here's the first (and potentially most enjoyable) part of the process - consumption!

Part 1: Consumption

You can't build a beer can tower without first drinking vast quantities of beer! This can be achieved a little at a time, or with the occasional mass-contribution through a night of drinking games (we recommend Beer Pong!). However you do it, you'll soon start stocking up empty cans.

Surprisingly that's not the end of the consumption step, though. All of these cans must then be de-ringpulled and, ideally, rinsed out. This can be pretty time-consuming, especially when 20 or more cans build up by the sink! 

Once washed and de-ringpulled, you'll need to find a way to store the cans in between towers. As the number of cans grows, so too must the number of boxes. Between our second and third year we found ourselves filling 10 IKEA boxes (see this post).

Finally, it's useful to have a system in place for logging how many cans have been consumed. For this we use a spreadsheet, which not only allows you to keep track of the number of cans but also other statistics such as total ml/units consumed and who they were consumed by!

With this final piece in place it becomes possible to tell exactly when there are enough cans to build the next size of pyramid, which leads to the next stage - construction!

Beer Can Tower : Avalanche

An 11-Storey tower flying down a flight of stairs as promised - enjoy!

Down the stairs?

We've just finished running some tests for our latest plan to send a tower tumbling down the stairs. It took a bit of arts and crafts work to set up, but with an old cardboard box, some string, sellotape and a few pencils in strategic places we're all set!

 

Sadly due to how narrow our stairs are we're only going to be able to fit an 11-storey tower down them (286 cans), but we're working on ways to improve on that if we can!

BCT17

BCT17 

(21/10/12 - 17/11/12)

Destruction : String

The Ocado Shop - Revisited

Last weekend we finally cracked open the 14th and final box from our Ocado order, which we saved from last year so we'd have some beer in the house upon our return. To celebrate we unboxed all 210 cans and took some pictures.

 

We also decided to send Ocado an e-mail to thank them for their mistake - here's what we wrote:

"We just wanted to say thanks for an enormous quantity of inexpensive beer!

Around 9 months ago my housemates and I placed an order on your website for no less than 210 cans of Carlsberg, which saw us through the latter half of our second year of university nicely. We've been stockpiling cans for our beer can tower since the first year, and it currently contains around 1000 cans (you can find pictures of it here: http://beercantower.blogspot.co.uk/). This means that your store alone has supplied about 1/5th of all that we've collected to date!

I've attached a photo of the crates the day they arrived, as well as some from the night when we finished off the 14th and final box. Thanks again!"

 

Sadly all we got back was one of those generic "thanks for the feedback" e-mails, which was very disappointing - we were hoping for something a little more imaginative than a copy+paste response. Maybe we should e-mail Carlsberg to see if they'd appreciate it...

Probably the most abundant lager in our house...

 

Milestones

Things have been fairly quiet since university started, but we did recently hit the 1000 can mark! With this we've also broken 2000 units, and are up to 51 different types of can.

There will definitely be some BCT-related antics this weekend so expect another update soon!

Third Year - The Beginning of the End

So this is it, our final year! It's a week before lectures start and I imagine there will be plenty of cans contributed in that time. We just finished going over the small number of cans we were able to bring up from our summers, and now it's time to get drinking towards 20 storeys!

Year 2 Statistics

Totals

672 Cans
305 Litres
1372 Units

Can Breakdown

Alex: 316
Jon: 164.5
Ian: 35
Dave: 54
Marta: 61
Guests: 41.5

Other Stats

Most cans contributed by a guest: 10.5 (Chris)
Cans broken beyond repair: 8
Most cans contributed in one night: 30
Fastest Jug Time: 28:47 (Dave)
Fastest Can Time: 6 seconds (Dave)

Weakest Beverage: Tesco Value Lager (2%) (we're not proud)
Strongest Beverage: Faxe (10%)

Tallest Tower: 2.62m (16 storeys)

And that's it!

Our second year is officially over - the house has been vacated and the cans have been stored away ready for our return sometime in September.

This place will be pretty quiet until then, but I will be posting some second year statistics and perhaps one or two other things over the course of the summer. The second half of the swing footage will be uploaded sometime at the start of our third year so keep an eye out for that, too!

Year 2 casualties

This year has seen various beer can towers kicked, driven and swung into, and as such we were always going to suffer some losses. In spite of all our efforts, however, we've only had to write off 8 of the former cans since the vast majority of the damage caused has been superficial.

We're taking this as a sign - if we've only managed to destroy 8 out of some 900 cans then we might just have to up the ante with the destructions next year!

Boxing up

Well, after several trips to IKEA we just finished boxing up all the cans for storage over the summer. It took 10 full boxes in all:

Each box contains between 80 and 100 cans, and we've counted 923 cans so far (one box is still open for last minute additions). This is the last time we'll have to store the cans for any great length of time - around this time next year we'll be crushing everything down for recycling!

Swing Video!

As promised, here's the first part of our video footage from the swing:

What happens...

...when you introduce a 560-can beer can tower to a make-shift swing? Well we've been finding out recently, and the answer is lots of destruction! Here are the before and after shots:

Videos to follow soon!

BCT16

BCT16 

(13/05/12 - 20/06/12)

Destruction : "Beer Mobile"

Beer Mobile

After the relatively unsuccessful attempt to destroy BCT15 with a mobile phone, we began discussing what other methods might be more successful. One of the most promising ideas that we had was to buy a toy car and drive it into the tower, which led to us buying a remote control 4x4 and ultimately to the destruction of BCT16.

And so the Beer Mobile was bought, and after much test-driving around our house we were ready to destroy the tower - but not before giving it some more appropriate decoration first!

 The destruction couldn't have gone better, and I suspect that this will not be its only appearance - expect to see more of it in the near future!

BCT15

BCT15 

(13/03/12 - 05/05/12)

Destruction : "Mobile Phone"

BCT14

BCT14  

(18/01/12 - 13/03/12)

Destruction : "Heffalump"

(No video available)

Looking back: The Ocado Shop

The start of Term 2 brought with it an incredible stroke of luck which led to our most outrageous bulk order of beer to date. Supplies of beer in our house were running low, and whilst we wanted to order more online none of the standard supermarkets seemed to be offering any deals.

This all changed, though, when we received an Ocado gift voucher from WHSmiths and decided to check it out. In so doing, we stumbled upon a mistake on their website where they were offering £12 15-packs of Carlsberg on 2-for-£10.

Needless to say we capitalised and ordered 14 boxes (210 cans-worth), which combined with our £10-off voucher cost us a grand total of £60. That works out as £2 for every 7 cans of beer!

The Ocado Van arrives (25/01/12)

When we checked back on their website the next day we discovered that the pricing had already been corrected to 2-for-£20. Not that it mattered to us though - we'd already bought 92 litres from them!

The Ocado Tower

Cheers, Ocado!

Looking back: Year 2 Term 1

With the summer behind us we found ourselves moving into our new house in Coventry and beginning our second year. It took us some time to get the cans out of storage (read: back from Jon's grandparents!), and the cans drunk during this period combined with the small number we collected over the summer meant that by the time we got the first year cans back we had enough for 11 storeys.

Things were not all plain sailing though. The carpet in the new house was particularly uneven, which ultimately led to us buying some big sheets of thick card to form a base. Finally, on the 6th of October 2011 the beer can tower was reconstructed in its new home.

BCT9 - 165 cans

BCT11 - 286 cans

BCT10 - 220 cans

After this the cans came flying in - we had 237 cans in total during this term which beat our entire first year of university. By the christmas holidays the tower was comprised of 13 storeys and was an impressive 2.16 metres in height. Its construction marked the first time we had needed a chair in order to complete it, which was an achievement in itself! We also experimented with a beer can 'castle', comprised of a 10 storey tower with two 7 storey towers attached.

BCT12 - 364 cans

BCT13 - 455 cans

Castle - 388 cans

Sometime during this term it became clear that our original 15 storey target was going to be smashed. We also realised that the tower's new home could only last for one more storey before it extended out too far into the corridoor, and so it was going to need to be moved elsewhere...

Looking back: Year One

Our first year of university was where it all started. It was in October 2010 that we all arrived at Warwick University, although the tower itself did not begin until mid-way through our second term.

The earliest record that I have of it comes from the 28th of April, 2011. By this time the tower was already at 7 storeys, although in actual fact this only represents 84 cans. The tower continued to grow slowly during this time, until we eventually reached what would be our peak of 9 storeys sometime in June.

28/04/2011

11/06/2011

15/05/2011

This isn't quite the full story though. Not long after building the 9 storey tower, I returned to my room one evening to find it scattered all over the floor - I can only assume that it fell victim to a vaccume cleaner one morning. In fact by the end of our first year we had enough cans to build a slightly more impressive 10 storeys, but with the tower in pieces we decided to leave the construction as something to look forward to at the start of our second year.

Cleaner Strikes!

At the end of a rather uneventful first year, then, we boxed and bagged up 233 beer cans, ready to recommence construction when we returned to uni the following October. Back then I remember us deciding that 15 storeys would be a respectable target for the end of university - however as I'm writing this we are nearing the end of our second year and have already constructed one better than this!

Introduction

The aim of this blog is to track the progress of the Beer Can Tower - an ongoing project between an otherwise innocent house of Warwick University students.

It all began over a year ago during our first year, when I decided to start building a beer can tower to rival the one my older brother constructed during his university days. By the end of our first year we had built a 10 storey tower which comprised of a then-impressive 220 cans. Not satisfied with this, however, we decided to have the cans moved into storage so that we could continue it this year. As a result of this it has developed into something of a monster - in fact as I'm writing this we have 912 cans of almost 50 different varieties.

This blog will be a place for us to upload our photos as the tower progresses; and together with our youtube channel we hope to share our antics with everyone as we build increasingly outrageous towers and destroy them in ridiculous ways!