Got a good book for Christmas. Behind the scenes at Scrapheap Challenge. Show Started in England the came to USA renamed Junk Yard Wars. Tell about the show and how it came about. Looking forward to Junk Yard wars DVD's
I don't know much about the show but I used to love watching it. My favorite was when they built dragsters
My all time favourate was when the three teams built aeroplanes, The American team built something only the Wright bros could have believed in, The French team built a thing that looked ok ish, but still did not really fly, mean while the team from England built the strangest mono wheeled biplane ever seen, Needless to say to English team won, thier weird biplane flew beautifully.
I used to watch that show, the things I remember most were the bad welding and hack work taking things apart. Did a lot of people get hurt in the process?
Not nearly enough, like all things done for TV there were a whole team of people unseen by the camera who welded things so they were safe, added rollover bars, cages and what ever else was needed to keep the teams 'safe'. In the same way the scrap heap is 'loaded' with the parts that the 'expert' has told the crew will be needed, looks good on the TV.
Actually over here there were engineers who oversaw everything to try to keep them "safe" but the teams actually did almost all the work ....after the build day they had a second day they called a safety day....either one team member or possibly the whole team would come back to the junkyard and finish weld and add cages and whatever was deemed neccessary to have a useable machine (as useable as it was originally designed) I got a little miffed at this on one of our builds as the other team came back on safety day and spent a good 5 or 6 hours "finishing" the machine they built....but it was just a TV show and it wouldn't work very well if they only had one competitor! My team was the "custom cruisers" We did the stupid suitcase vehicles,submarine out of a propane tank and in the finals we built a hockey machine...my first driver gave up a lot of goals and didn't score any and we ended up losing the finals to some good old boys from Tenessee (I think) I have to say it was probably the most fun I have ever had in my life we busted ass on the build day from sunrise to well after sunset tearing up stuff and building weird shit and then competing with it...man that was good times!
Anybody see the UK TV series Salvage squad when a couple of guys and a girl rescued stuff that the owner would never have finished? They did a Lola T142 F5000 car amongst other things
series is still running over here , in fact a few of us are applying for the next series hopefully . you can read about the shows history here . http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/scrapheap2008/more_1.html
A Lola, that would have been intrestting, Big fan of Eric Broadley, would have loved a Lola, had to settle for GT40
Oops! Not put there to make me seem grand. Always interested on peoples take on it. Huge input from others behind the scenes as you might guess. But I promise you that I'm a proper Workin' in the shed sort of chap. Slowly chewing my way through my personal car projects.
A little coy Jerry, I think you can be proud of being a part of that series. one of the Discovery channels is re-running the series currently, I still have not caught re-building the Lola.