Have you seen the video of the super-sized Jenga game played with Caterpillar equipment?
More than a million people have checked it out. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t, you can watch it above.
If you’ve ever played Jenga, you know how tricky it is to pull out the rectangular blocks one at a time and move them to the top without making them all come crashing down. The game gets more challenging as the bottom of the stack has fewer blocks and the top has more.
So how did Cat create this first video in its Built For It Trials series?
The idea was to have five Cat machines play with 27 blocks, removing and repositioning them one by one without making the stack fall.
To make the blocks slide easier, they each received a sprinkling of the wax used on shuffleboard tables to make game pucks slide faster. The blocks were so large that crew members bought up every can of shuffleboard wax they could find within a 40-mile radius of the film set. How much wax was used? A total of 72 cans.
Each block weighed 600 pounds. The total weight of the blocks used to create the stack was more than 8 tons.
Twelve Go Pro cameras were used to record the game. Two were placed on the ground and remained intact throughout the shoot, although one of the cameras came within an inch of being smashed by a falling block.
Cat says the machine operators may have been nervous at first, but they were ready to go by the time the action began. “Each and every one of them wanted to tackle the most difficult maneuvers, because they were certain they could make the equipment do whatever was asked of their machine,” according to a Cat statement.