Well, a year has passed since the last Can struction fundraiser for the food bank, and this year was another success.

This year's entry by our team was based on a tower which has been designed for the 2008 Bejing Olympics, called the Sea Serpents Tower.

It's constructed from about 1000 cans of tuna, and is held together with nothing more than some elastic bands and cardboard between each layer.



Actually, as I was placing the very last group of cans on the very last layer, the whole damn thing started to fall towards me (I was standing on a ladder at this point) and I grabbed it just in time... sat there for a good half hour on the ladder hugging a tower of tuna until we figured out how to fix it. Turns out the cardboard had crushed on one side (we'd been using a laser level to keep it aligned until then), so we shimmed it back straight and luckily didn't have to take much of it down.

Photo of me during the trial run - notice how much of a difference we made by lining the labels up in the final version:


The one casualty of the day was pretty spectacular to watch... seemed in slow-motion. Glad it wasn't us!



Here's hoping we win the Best Structure Award!!

   

Yes, that's been noted, ... We had trouble figuring out how to get across that it was designed after a building and not a piece of licorice (I was actually leary of choosing this design because of that). They wouldn't let us but up a printout of that picture of the design, but it's mentioned on a signboard that sits next to each model.

Not very tempting at all, though we joked about it - it is for the food bank, after all.

   

That's beautiful!

   

Well, the banquet was last night, and our team cleaned up! We won for structural ingenuity (the one we wanted to win, obviously), and we also won "people's choice".

   

Congrats!! It's an impressive tower!


(how tall was that final version?)

   

Just over two meters, I think was the final height.