BCT18

BCT18 

(20/01/13 - 22/02/13)

Destruction : Helicopter

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...