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The Test
After the highs and lows of 10 hours of back-breaking work, the teams now had one hour of 'tinker time' to finalise their machines in advance of the test.
In what appeared to be a turnaround, the Extinguishers discovered a fault in their machine and they needed to put a support midway up their augur. To do this they had to remove a section of the screw, which left a potentially serious chink in their armour.
In contrast, after a good night's sleep the Beach Bums were in fine fettle and following some minor fiddling they even had time to paint their mud plugger.
The tension mounted as both teams realised the importance of the event. To the winners, a place in the Scrapheap Challenge final. To the losers, well, nothing really.
The rules couldn't have been simpler – a head-to-head over two runs. For the first run, the teams would leave the start line, race around the corner and then reverse their machines into a 100-tonne pile of top soil. The second run was on a similar course but instead of topsoil the teams had to contend with a gigantic mountain of gravel. They had a maximum of 10 minutes for each run. The team with the highest combined weight of material gathered after the two runs would be declared the winner. Simple as.
Round one
The Bums were first to the topsoil. They cranked over their giant wheeled shovel and to everyone's surprise it appeared to be working perfectly. By halfway through the first half of the course they already had over 900kg of topsoil in their skip.
On the other side though, the Extinguishers were struggling. Their augur jammed and after a restart they discovered the problem. If they ran their engine in second it was too fast and the material was simply thrown out of the augur, where they'd earlier removed that section. If they ran in first gear it simply stalled. It was a disaster for the Extinguishers as after the first half of the topsoil section they had a mere 90kg in their skip.
At 10 minutes Lisa called time and the teams returned to the start to have their loads measured. The Extinguishers had eventually managed to grab 224kg of soil in the 10 minutes, but the mighty Beach Bums scooped up an astounding 1780kg. Round one to the Bums.
Round two
As the teams lined up for round two, Extinguishers' expert Ken was convinced his augur design would fare better in the gravel than it had in the topsoil, so it was all to play for.
The invigorated Extinguishers rushed off the line and beat the Bums to the gravel face. After an initial problem they quickly found the right balance of revs for their augur and were soon merrily chucking gravel into their skip. Sadly for them, the Bums' wheel seemed to like gravel as much as it did topsoil.
As the teams returned to the start line for the final time to have their gravel weighed, the question on everyone's lips was had the Extinguishers done enough to recover from their early defeat?
Rob announced the final cumulative weights. The valiant Extinguishers had a total weight of 687kg but the triumphant Beach Bums had a frankly incredible 4115 kg.
So it was victory and a place in the Scrapheap final to the Bums.
