Happy Festivus, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Three-Day Weekend. Whatever holiday you celebrate, have a good one. At mid-west Bakker Central, we celebrate Christmas- complete with the breakfast of bagels and lox and the stockings hung by the chimney with care.
For many years now, the holiday season has been the only time we all descend on the parent's homestead en mass - and we make sure it is full of the usual family drama, as well as a therapy-inducing dose of kookiness. For at least two years, the younger Bakker men have been rumbling about a Tannenbaum Twist. In 2004, we broke out a model train (Grandpa Gorda got us hooked on model trains at least 20 years ago) and set it up on a lazysusan to make the miniature festivus-pole-with-pine-branches rotate (This beta version 0.6 was a complete failure). This year it got out of beta and Twisted Christmas 1.0 debuted.
This is the story of a non-profit venture's journey from idea to proof-of-concept, with a strong marketing plan for Holiday 2007.
The design and production team is comprised of one ABD philosopher, a lawyer and a 35+ year upper management veteran (note: there are two unused engineering degrees in the group). A signature Bakker characteristic is the need to pontificate a play-by-play (see! It's genetic!); so on Christmas eve I sat down with the team to try to recapture the day's confabulation. I was not disappointed - in the words of one of the team members, "I can reproduce crapola at will." So what follows are excerpts from the interview:
TAB: Willem, tell me about the concept design.
WFBII: For the purposes of development, we split into two teams and used concurrent development techniques to work on two solutions to the same problem. We were fortunate that both approaches completed development simultaneously. At completion, we had two very different solutions, one had the advantages of scalability and elegance, but the other was ready was ready to go to market immediately. Management decided to go with the immediate solution to reduce time to market, and the two design teams were re-integrated to finish the project in record time [who's record - no idea].
TAB: Doug, tell me about the configuration of Twisted Christmas 1.0.
DAB: Twisted Christmas uses a motor harvested from a broken office shredder that has had a lifetime of not-for-profit use. We stripped the gears (there were initial efforts to use them). Inspired by Junkyard Wars, a flower pot was used to increase the gear ratio in order keep the tree from spinning too fast. This aim was supplemented by an external electrical junction box to further decrease the power unleashed by the paper chewing monster.
TAB: Um, Dad - any b.s. to add?
WFB: We deployed the principles of Rube Goldberg and Junkyard Wars to bring this fiasco to fruition. Some of the designs were based on low-risk-speed-into torque capacity of the drive mechanism. We diligently avoided precision and used flexible alignments and mounting of the drive mechanism. One of the constraints we maintained was the superstructure from a previously failed deployment to reduce the gears driving the platform; this failed because one of the gears stripped itself in the process. Instead of redesigning the superstructure, we kept it as a restraint for a pulley-and-belt speed reduction deployment - again based on the best principles of Rube Goldberg. Incidentally, the Tree needed to be secured with four washer-screw combinations to prevent serious injury to observers.
In the absence of a slip-ring, a large extension cord was used to allow a lighted implementation of Twisted Christmas. Consumers can anticipate a fully-automated, slip-ring supported design with Twisted Christmas 2.0 One of the features of the shredder is a motor reversal, allowing an uncoiling of the extension cord and recoiling at will, this feature may be more fully realized in 2.0.
Well everyone, I hope your long weekend was filled with as much laughter as Twisted Christmas 1.0 inspired here. If not, keep an eye on the stores for the commercial debut of our product - and you too can have your own twisted holiday. Happy holidays and best wishes for 2007.
Video of the design and production phase.
Note: No animals (excluding people) were harmed, and all warning labels were removed thereby nullifying any warranties or liability of the parts' producers. No live shrubbery were used, abused or otherwise sacrificed in this process.
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