Where'd Majid's post go? I'll pay money to see him take a whipper on one of his homemade cams, and I bet there are a lot of other RC.com posters who would as well.

February? Sounds fine to me... I had picked the end of the year rather arbitrarily, figuring it would be far enough out to give people time to do it yet soon enough to not lose interest. I forgot about people generally being busy around the holidays, so pushing it back is probably a good idea.

Thinking about it some more, I think that having a predetermined crack size may bias the strength testing towards designs with high strength and no range. To account for this the crack will be set to a random width of somewhere between 1.5" and 1.625" for the strength test. That should weed out non-adjustable miniature Big Bros and ginormous ballnuts and make designing in at least a bit of expansion range necessary.

Thoughts?

Anyway, with the activity over in the Homemade Cams thread it occurs to me now that there haven't been all that many challenges posted here on RC.com and its damned well time we had one.... (well, a second one.... I'm still waiting for the TR from WVUCLMBR's multi-day 35 foot small-wall epic at Cooper's Rock.... Thought I forgot, didja? )

I might be in.

Let me mull a crazy idea around for a while.

A couple hints, it would lose the because of it's weight and would be so specialized as to be nearly useless. If I make a nearly useless cam, I might call it the majid special.

Build a cam and send it to me before the end of the year. ...lets standardize on cams that fit in a 1.5" crack.

Ok, here's the new post to replace the edits above....

I've been kicking this around with Our Benevolent Blue Overlord and we have some options....

1. Go ahead with the competition using whatever rules we want

2. Wait until after New Years, at which point he should be able to score us a corporate sponsor and some awesome prizes.

Option 1 gets us going sooner, but Option 2 has awesome prizes. I assume everyone would prefer Option 2?

-a.

EDIT- Oh, and I'm moving this over to The Lab....

Viva la 2009 homemade cam cup! I say wait. This could be epic.

Is the sponsorship to pay for the prize or is it to pay for the cost in prototyping?

Also, is there an "atypical" category.

What I have in mind is very much a camming device. It is not however what would be considered a cam (friends, camalots, spring loaded thingies that go into cracks). To my knowledge, it's never been seen before.

The mockup will be made from wood and owing to it's design will be both weaker and heavier than most of the entries. I do expect it to be capable of it's intended purpose. Scary aid. The thing is not designed to go into a crack though so it's hard to score against the others.

Hey Ryan,

Up thread a bit I think we were kicking around an entry deadline of end of February or something like that to give everyone time after the holiday craziness to build their entries. A definite date hasn't been set yet though, as I haven't settled on a set of rules and Our Mostly Benevolent Blue Overlord is looking to secure a sponsor and prizes.

As for the rest, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking to get in this thread.... How do you all want to structure the competition? The rules above are just what I came up with and I have no problem changing them around a bit (or a lot) if someone else has a better idea. Plus the sponsor might want to change a thing or two, so these rules are by no means carved in stone.

I don't know if we'll get terribly many entries, so I don't know how well awards for individual criteria will work (hence the weighted composite scoring above).

Personally, I don't mind cannibalized parts but I'd probably want to see a bit of a penalty for doing so beyond a certain point. For my prototypes I use RE Durangos, but RE Comets and CCH Aliens also disassemble easily. FWIW, the spec cam I'll be providing instructions for will be entirely DIY with parts mostly from McMaster-Carr.

EDIT- Oh, I should probably point out that I've dropped the target size that we batted around a bit earlier since scoring based on expansion ratio takes care of the issue I was worried about with giant nuts. so feel free to do anything up to ~6.5" expanded size, if you are so inclined. The spec cam instructions will probably be for something ~2" expanded, depending on how the cost works out for the materials.

Hey John,

Well, if there's enough interest we certainly could do a non-metal category (might as well include composites...).

But you don't really need a metal shop to do this.... The only tools used in the instructions I'm working on are a drill, a nail, a hacksaw, a file, a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.

Personally, I was considering that wood grain vinyl sticker stuff....

...CCH Aliens also disassemble easily...

heh.