9x9 Tower (August 2010)
This is the tallest tower I have built to date. It consisted of 70 vertical card stories, which measures approximately 20 feet 6 inches (6.25 meters). I estimate that I used about 600 to 700 decks on this tower, but it is difficult to say with absolute certainty because I never counted them all (and seriously, can you blame me?).
The tower turned out exactly as I had planned, and I was surprised at how easy it was to construct, at least relative to what I had anticipated. To my surprise, the task turned out to be much more of a mental challenge and a test of physical endurance, rather than a test of pure cardstacking skill. Building tall towers really requires no advanced techniques - just a lot of patience, ample time, and literally hundreds of decks of cards. It can be quite mind-numbing to build the same floorplan over and over and over and over again.
When people find out I was so close (relatively) to the world record, they always ask why I didn't just go for it. The truth is, I did have the vertical space to build taller, but the real problem was that I ran out of height with my ladder. This tower was actually quite difficult to build because I only had one 16' ladder, which I frequently had to move around the tower to get an appropriate building angle. As you can probably imagine, a ladder that large is quite heavy. I was often building by myself, at night, with nobody around, and moving such an awkwardly large ladder mere inches from the tower never became less terrifying the more I did it.
At the beginning of this project, I was very aware of this ladder limitation and so I intentionally placed the base of the tower so that it was immediately adjacent to a catwalk that crosses the room at 16 feet up (you can see this catwalk during the knockdown in the wide angle shot of the tower). I was betting that I'd be able to lean out from the edge of this catwalk to finish the top stories of the building, and fortunately, I had planned it correctly and was able to do just that. This is how I managed to finish the last few feet of the tower.
The tower was built on a 3/4" thick, 2'x2' square of plywood. The footprint of the tower was a 9x9 square with a "+" shape across the middle of the box. The design is very clear in both the photos and video.
The tower turned out exactly as I had planned, and I was surprised at how easy it was to construct, at least relative to what I had anticipated. To my surprise, the task turned out to be much more of a mental challenge and a test of physical endurance, rather than a test of pure cardstacking skill. Building tall towers really requires no advanced techniques - just a lot of patience, ample time, and literally hundreds of decks of cards. It can be quite mind-numbing to build the same floorplan over and over and over and over again.
When people find out I was so close (relatively) to the world record, they always ask why I didn't just go for it. The truth is, I did have the vertical space to build taller, but the real problem was that I ran out of height with my ladder. This tower was actually quite difficult to build because I only had one 16' ladder, which I frequently had to move around the tower to get an appropriate building angle. As you can probably imagine, a ladder that large is quite heavy. I was often building by myself, at night, with nobody around, and moving such an awkwardly large ladder mere inches from the tower never became less terrifying the more I did it.
At the beginning of this project, I was very aware of this ladder limitation and so I intentionally placed the base of the tower so that it was immediately adjacent to a catwalk that crosses the room at 16 feet up (you can see this catwalk during the knockdown in the wide angle shot of the tower). I was betting that I'd be able to lean out from the edge of this catwalk to finish the top stories of the building, and fortunately, I had planned it correctly and was able to do just that. This is how I managed to finish the last few feet of the tower.
The tower was built on a 3/4" thick, 2'x2' square of plywood. The footprint of the tower was a 9x9 square with a "+" shape across the middle of the box. The design is very clear in both the photos and video.