BIG RAPIDS – The Ferris State University Rube Goldberg team will travel to Los Angeles
this week to appear on the Jimmy Kimmel Show Friday, April 20. The show airs at 12:05
a.m. EST on ABC. The team made an appearance in New York City on NBC’s The TODAY Show
on Easter Sunday.
The team won first place in the national Rube Goldberg competition held at Purdue University on March 31. The team won first place over Purdue University, University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, Penn State University, University of Cincinnati, Hofstra University and Washington State Community College.
Traveling to the show will be co-advisors Tom Hollen of Grand Rapids, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering Technology, and Dan Wanink of Ironwood, associate professor of CAD Drafting/Tool Design; and team members Tom Sybrandy (captain) of Holt, Matt Tomaszewski of Bryon Center, Mike Dunakin of Grand Rapids and James Travis III of Cedar Springs. They will be accompanied by Associate Vice President of Marketing and Communications Shelly Armstrong and Assistant Director of News Services Leah Nixon. The team’s fifth member, Fred Reinecke of Muskegon, is unable to be at the shows due to being stationed in Iraq.
The College of Technology students incorporated such items as a toy train, a Slinky, a jack-in-the-box, dominoes and a hobby horse, among other items, in a 345-step process to make freshly squeezed orange juice, thereby setting a world record and beating out previous record holder and four-time defending champion Purdue University to win the annual competition.
“We’ve come to the competition for the past four years, and after last year’s disappointment when our machine had a malfunction, we really wanted to come back and win this year,” said Sybrandy.
Purdue had previously held the world record for most elaborate device with a machine that incorporated 125 steps. Ferris’ effort, in which the team invested more than 3,000 hours, is being submitted to Guinness World Records, which officially recognized Purdue’s previous effort for “Largest Rube Goldberg.”
“At the beginning of the year we set the goal of 300 [different steps], “said senior Tomaszewski. “We wanted to win as well as the set the world record for the most steps.” Despite the whimsical nature of the event, the competition requires students to apply a wide-range of engineering skills and work closely together to problem-solve the many ways in which their intricate contraptions can fail to achieve their end result. Winning machines must complete two successful runs, and points are deducted if students have to assist the machine once it has started. Judges award points based on the creative use of materials, team chemistry, flow of machine and the theme of a machine.
“As team advisor, I could not be more pleased with a team that made it their goals to win and set a new record, and then met both of those goals,” said Hollen. “We want to thank all the people at the University and in the College who helped these students achieve success.”
The team is also the subject of a documentary film, which has been in the works for the past year. An independent film company from California has been following and filming the team since last year’s competition. They came to Big Rapids to follow the team to Purdue.
The competition is named for Rube Goldberg – a cartoonist made famous by his elaborate drawings of imaginary devices requiring many steps to perform simple everyday tasks. The challenge of the 19th annual event was to take a whole orange, squeeze the juice from it and then pour the juice into a glass using 20 or more steps. Past competitions have required machines to perform such tasks as mark a ballot, toast a piece of bread or put a stamp on an envelope.
Sponsors for this year’s event included Omega Engineering Inc. of Stamford, Conn.; Minute Maid Co.; BAE Systems; Bosch Group Inc.; Daimler-Chrysler Corp.; General Electric Co.; Kimberly-Clark Corp.; Lockheed Martin Corp.; and Motorola Inc. Purdue’s College of Engineering and College of Technology also support the event.