After the last attempt at Nature's Bounty, one thing was perfectly clear. We needed a new tree. Here's why.
This janky-ass lame-ass cardboard-lookin painted-by-a-five-year-old tree? That's an embarrassing tree. If I were an apple farmer I'd chop this one down and hope it lands on myself. I wouldn't even leave a s suicide note. People would know why.
Tree are made of wood so that’s what we got. I got the materials (wood) and a big saw blade and cut a new beautiful tree out of a piece of wood that used to be a different tree. To be fair it was probably insulting to the original tree (but to call the cardboard tree a tree is even more insulting to trees).
I wanted to make it strong and rigid so no glue or tape would be used to hold it together - only precision and accuracy. I measured the thickness of the wood and cut that length down the middle of the second half from the top to the near the bottom. Then I cut the other one from the bottom up and then they slide into each other.
Then, it was handed over to our professional painter Charlie to make it pretty and all that. The construction was done; now all we needed were the apples.
The apples were much easier to make. We got some green ping pong balls of the correct size (see previous blog post - ping pong balls are 40mm, exactly the specified size for the competition. It's like they planned it that way).
We glued a magnet on each to act as the stem. Then, we took these green apples and spraypainted them red, with the aid of our master artist Charlie.
Now we needed the apples to stick to the tree. We all know real trees have high iron content, so to simulate this element of realism this we stuck pins into the branches and hung the apples by their “stems”.
One final adjustment that was made was sitting it in a shallow container and filling said container with weight to hold it in place so The Claw wouldn't knock it over.
Quick Quiz: What do you think we used for extra weight?
A. Uncooked Rice
B. AA batteries
C. Beef Vegetable Soup
D. Sliced Apples.
Give us 100 bonus points and we'll tell you the answer. Or you can look at the photo
Now look at it! It's a thing of beauty!
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