Sweeper designs face the ‘Scrapheap Challenge’

Anyone who has an interest in tinkering about and making things – ie engineers

– would have to admit to more than a spot of envy towards the teams taking part

in Scrapheap Challenge. The whole concept of botching something up out of bits

of rubbish and getting the hands dirty is irresistible. So, imagine my delight

and surprise when I found myself invited to be the “expert” for a

team building a road sweeper in Los Angeles – all expenses paid. Yes, I could

manage that.

Frequent communications with the organisers led to certain items being available

for the build – let’s face it, you wouldn’t really expect to find an ex-PowerGen

Land Rover in a junkyard in California, would you?

Both teams duly gathered in Los Angeles. My team – The Chaos Crew – were old

hands, having for a previous challenge built a hydraulically operated demolition

device, which took the form of giant pincers mounted on an old Transit. This

would have won easily had not a hose burst.

Our competitors were from Jaguar in Coventry who took the whole thing very

seriously indeed – as anyone who saw the programme might have noticed. The judge

was Roger Hoadley, MD of Scarab.

Scrapyard search

Scrapheap Challenge rules require that the teams have no knowledge of what they

are to build prior to the event, so, on the morning of the build day, before

dawn, we were off to the scrapyard to do the preliminaries – sound, lighting,

make up (well lashings of suntan lotion actually) and our designer boilersuits.

Then the challenge was announced and the ten hours allowed for making the machine

began.

We duly “found” the Land Rover, but unfortunately the auxiliary engine

I’d asked for turned out to have been difficult to adapt, so we had to think

again , and quickly. The alternative design involved making the Land Rover front

wheel drive and welding a third axle upside down to the chassis. This, in turn,

was connected to the rear prop shaft with one wheel flange used to drive the

elevator and the handbrake on the opposite side used as a clutch. The elevator

was of the squeegee type and based on a lightweight conveyor used for loading

missiles into aeroplanes.

Inevitably, we ran out of time so development would have to take place during

the challenge, but, at least, we had everything running OK.

The Jaguar guys had built a “pooper-scooper” with a small auxiliary

engine directly driving a home-made impeller. Material was drawn through a wanderhose

and passed through the fan into a truncated Transit panel van.

Result in the balance

The competition took place in the car park of a tourist attraction in Irvine

– 40 miles or so from the scrapyard. Vast amounts of litter, mostly newspaper,

were scattered about and we had 30 minutes to collect as much as possible.

Both machines worked pretty well, but our complete lack of development ment

that bulldozing was a big problem. Nevertheless, we were able to pick up a good

quantity of litter.

The opposition, on the other hand, were able to cruise round the car park picking

up coke cans and heavy gravel with their “pooper scooper”. That is

until their fan was smashed by the gravel hitting it, which is fairly inevitable

with this sort of design.

Even so, as the challenge was to be decided on weight, we started to get a bit

worried when the collected material from each machine was hung from each end

of a giant balance. Victory had been snatched from our grasp. We were all exhausted

and filthy dirty, but the runner up’s champagne went down a treat and helped

soften the blow. After all, it’s not the winning – it’s taking part (bah, humbug

!) and we’d all had a fantastic experience.