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| Cathy | Henry | FMC engineer | |
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FMC engineer chief: Greg Bryant Introduction How long have you been growing your beard? Since 1973. I started it while working as a commercial diver on board an oil rig (WODECO VI) drilling offshore on the western side of Sumatra, Indonesia. It's pretty steamy over there and not having to shave was a way to avoid razor burn and soap rash. Plus, being young, I thought girls might like it. How did you get into doing this sort of engineering? By this sort of engineering do you mean dealing with insane machines built in haste with mostly good intentions, but not always with the best parts? Or 'this sort' meaning taking a 300 acre, partially demolished and flooded steel and brick powerplant and turning it into an automotive theme park? Probably both — so here goes. I like engineering that deals with people and machines in hazardous or difficult environments such as underwater, outer space, race courses, remote areas, New York City, film sets, etc. Planning and designing while trying to account for all the 'what-ifs' is impossible, so dealing with and solving problems in real time with what you have is, to me, the essence of good engineering. I earned my engineering degree from California Polytechnic State University where 'learn by doing' is still the basic teaching philosophy. My first year out of school I worked in Alaska as a seafood processing plant machinist and engineer where "if you don't have it you don't need it" helped generate creative solutions to many problems. Then it was just sort of following that path to see where it would lead. Working on "The Abyss" was the crossover point in my career from what I will call mainstream engineering into the real abyss — entertainment engineering. What was filming FMC like? The whole FMC crew was the best I have ever worked with. As an American working for the first time in England I was a bit concerned, being out of my normal working environment, that assembling the right crews to transform the location into show sets and to build the show equipment was going to be quite difficult. It turned out that starting with our mechanical contractor, Chris French of Steel Monkey, and our site general contractor, Roger Chopping of Project 42, we were able to put together an extended group of talented people who had worked well together on previous shows. This lead to an amazingly collaborative and proactive FMC team. We actually built and installed all the show equipment and transformed the location in only 8 weeks. On the show side, because of overlapping schedules — teams came in to work on their vehicles 2 days before their scheduled competition — so the engineering group started their week with the new teams' arrival on Sunday morning, usually after finishing up late Saturday. Call time was 7:30 AM and we generally worked until about 11:00 PM. Our responsibilities included working with the teams, making sure their vehicles were prepared, and on show days (up to 4 each week) to make sure each event's equipment was set up and functional. At times we had up to 9 teams working in the vehicle shop. That coupled with vehicle repairs between events, locating sometimes obscure (at least for England) car parts on short notice (axles from a Nissan Patrol or a starter motor for a 350 Chevy), repairing punctured tyres, all while consuming about 1500 cans of Red Bull, made for interesting days. The FMC location engineering team was composed of Scrapheap Challenge and Junkyard Wars veterans (representing England, Australia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the USA) and they deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their behind the scenes work and some often amazing saves on damaged vehicles. What was the biggest worry overseeing this project? Making sure that what we built was safe for both the drivers and the crew. After that it was trying to meet the scheduled first filming day while fighting against some really bad weather. Lots of cold rain and strong winds hampered our progress. In the cooling towers the wind speed actually increased, almost doubled as it entered, which made life difficult for the riggers inside who were working at heights of up to 175 feet. When we started, the cooling towers also had about 4 feet of water in them, which was pumped out, but we still had to contend with the rain filling them up again, preventing us from painting or installing floor-mounted equipment. Amazingly once filming started we had really nice weather, often quite hot and sunny. Further evidence that Cathy Rogers really is a goddess. Vehicles What was the most innovative vehicle in FMC? There were quite a few innovative ones and that makes it hard to decide, but certainly one of the most innovative and effective was the Chilean Desert Puma's entry, Marabunta. They used a Mitsubishi engine and transaxle, with the whole unit rotated so that one axle drove the front differential (from a Nissan Patrol) and one axle drove the rear differential (also from a Nissan Patrol). 4-wheel steering and a very sturdy wedge shaped body/rollcage combination rounded it off. A nice, polite, but totally insane driver complemented their entry. Another was the Washburn Family's Agrivator, an amazing and well-built 4-wheel steering vehicle with a Dodge 440 engine and an articulated arm carrying a fully functional 5th wheel. What was the weirdest vehicle in FMC? Again, quite a few weird ones, but the most effectively weird (and also very innovative) one had to be Octopush, the Aquaholics entry. Two V8 engines, eight wheels, all driven, and four-wheel steering. It might have looked like a rolling cartoon, but this was a serious, well engineered vehicle. Its performance in certain events is nothing short of astonishing. What was your most favourite vehicle in FMC? Without a doubt, and without saying they were necessarily the best, I really liked the tracked vehicles. "Wild Thing" entered by 3 Shades of Grey, is a true work of art. Southern Crusher from The Country Boys — that thing would scare you to death when it ran!! Steel Survivor from The Snow Diggers was both elegant and powerful, really a beautiful machine. Which team most impressed you with their hands-on skill? There were a quite a few and all the teams produced some really exceptional work, but the team of brothers, 3 Shades of Grey, were outstanding old world craftsman of the highest quality. They were also gentlemen in the truest and best sense of the word. I learned a lot from them. If you were building a machine to compete in FMC, how would you go about it? Nope. I'm not gonna do it. It's too easy to sit back and say how you would have done something, possibly better, but the credit really goes out to the teams for what they actually built and delivered. And I do mean delivered. Each team started with an idea and turned it into something real through a lot of hard work. Doing that is never easy and I'm not going to diminish any of their accomplishments in any way. Each team deserves a lot of respect for the great job they did. Games What kind of vehicle did you have in mind when you were designing the games? We hoped that the games were designed such that regardless of the type of vehicle entering they would still be able to compete effectively. Some vehicle types performed better in certain games than others, but overall that tended to balance out. The rules described important performance capabilities each vehicle should have. We expected both wheeled (number of wheels unknown) and tracked designs, but it would be interesting to see if we can get some other types of locomotion in the future. Were you able to build all the games as planned? Or did you have to refine them at all? Other than minor changes, most of the games worked as they were planned. Except Bumper Cars. Bumper Cars was supposed to have been exactly that, vehicles running into bumpers and bouncing off whilst scoring points. When the cars ran into the bumpers the first time, some welds broke on the big springs in the base and the bumpers didn't bump, they fell over. We paused the game just long enough to assess the damage and when we determined it would be safe to continue, the teams smashed the bumpers down until there was nothing left to score on. It was great, but it was also mayhem. After that first game we made the bumpers more like giant hockey pucks so that when hit they slid and were still in play until either they were against the safety barriers or time was called. Which game was the best test of the vehicles? Each game tested the vehicles in different ways. I wish we had enough time so that each team could have tried out all of the 9 events. How did you design the games to make sure they were safe? This was really a combination of both vehicle and event design. The rules specified that the vehicles would be involved in collisions and needed to be designed and built accordingly. Each vehicle's weight was not to exceed 3000 kg. Also, because there is no limit to people's creativity in some areas, we specified that the vehicles could only be built with defensive and not offensive capabilities. Our engineers inspected the vehicles during the build to make sure they would be both durable and safe. The rules also went into roll cage design in great detail because of our expectation (we were right, too) was that not all the vehicles would get through certain events without going over on their side. Our basic assumption was that drivers dressed in good safety equipment inside a safely constructed vehicle with a well designed and built roll cage could withstand reasonable collisions and rollovers safely. In order to reduce the severity of vehicle impacts the events were designed to limit either the length that vehicles could accelerate, to have slick surfaces to reduce traction, or to have obstacles placed which kept vehicle speeds relatively low. For example, the Sumo rings were actually speed bumps which in combination with the hazards placed within each ring segment for drivers to hopefully (but not always) avoid, kept speeds low enough for each of the drivers to be safe without limiting some very aggressive behaviour, indeed. Each game also had water-filled traffic barriers either surrounding the event or placed in locations to protect both the drivers and the crew around the event. Did it ever come close to disaster on FMC? Yep. But that's what kept it real. We tried to stay as close to the edge as possible without going over. If gravity wasn't a constraint, what sort of games would you like to build for FMC? Gravity is a constant so you'll just have to wait for FMC-2 and see what we come up with next! | |||
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