Ah the weekend. Wherever you are, its nice to be out of the office and onto other things. Right now GrabCAD has a few challenges on the go like the Keyshot Render Challenge and the Design Buzz Challenge. But we'd like to bring up our long-going yet neglected challenge, the Rube Goldberg Challenge. Feel like designing something for fun?
A Rube Goldberg 'Machine' is defined by Webster Dictionary as a "comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation.". Last year GrabCAD user Scott Bruins started his own experiment, asking users to submit parts of what became a large, community-created Rube Goldberg Machine. To what end? To have fun, in Scott's words.
So Scott and fellow GrabCADers Adam Pohl and Terry Stonehocker got together and started running our current Rube Goldberg Challenge. This is how they describe it.
Our goal is to build largest Rube Goldberg machine with as many engineers participating as possible. There can be several team entries with different approaches and CAD softwares used. The charm about this machine is that it is never ending.
The Idea is that everyone adds their own mechanism to the machine. So download the files, build the next mechanism(s) and when you are done post the new files on GrabCAD. Remember to add a comment if you are working on the next mechanism so others don't start building it.
So far we have 6 entries but we'd like to see more. There's all of 2 months left, but if we've got a long way to go if GrabCAD ever manages to create the largest Rube Goldberg in the World. Heck, we might be able to go for the Guinness Book of World Records! Regardless of the outcome, we've got free GrabCAD t-shirts for the winners. Swing down to the page and submit something special!
A few inspiring videos to get the creative juices going.
http://youtu.be/g2VCfOC69jc