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!