Extreme Engineering

Canadian student pranksters have turned city lights into Morse code, covered the mayor’s house in fake paint, and dangled a car beneath the Golden Gate Bridge—just to show they can. Our writer risked injury and arrest to join the cult

By Bob Parks Posted 08.19.2008 at 3:39 pm 7 Comments

THE SETUP

Stan Johnson (not his real name) planned the stunt for more than a year. “I admit that as a student, I may not know as much as a full-fledged engineer,” he says. “But we engineered the hell out of it.”

How to Suspend a Car in 328 Seconds: BELLY UP TO THE BAR UBC engineering students brought their gutted VW Beetle chassis to the bridge on the back of a flatbed trailer, then stationed it on the pedestrian walkway while others set up the drop.

HOOKED The UBC crowd machined a J-hook to match the measurements of a metal tab attached to the handrail assembly. The length of the hook put the cable out of reach of a clean-up crew wielding bolt cutters.

OVERBOARD To hang the car from the J-hook, the students belayed it using a nylon rope threaded through a carabiner. The plan was to let the car down until the cable was taut, then retrieve the rope, leaving the car dangling.

Jason Lee

In the summer of 2006, with his junior year approaching, Johnson, a tall kid with wild hair, spied a vintage 1960s Volkswagen in an overgrown apple orchard. Sure, the Beetle prank had been done before, but for UBCers, it’s a joke that every comedian wants to tell better. Inside the family’s garage, Johnson and his father, a heavy-equipment mechanic who promised to help if his son kept his grades up, excised the undercarriage, engine and transmission with an oxyacetylene torch and a reciprocating saw. They sandblasted the car, painted it, and welded metal beams to strengthen the shell.

Johnson assembled a crew, took measurements of the bridge, drew up elaborate plans, and practiced the deployment over and over on campus. He even put a PR strategy in place when he e-mailed Popular Science early last year offering a chance to document a stunt in action. University engineers have never let an outsider in on the details of a stunt before, typically taking implicit responsibility as a student body to ward off charges—any one stunt can earn several local and federal indictments—against any single student. (“These cases are hard to prosecute,” Vancouver police constable Jana McGuinness told me. “No individual comes forward.”) But to Johnson, talking to a reporter was worth the risk if it helped to earn him “the Black E,” the coveted cloth patch worn by UBC engineers. The Engineering Undergraduate Society awards these on rare occasions, and only for bringing wide media attention to a major stunt (on the society’s site, the term used is “STUdeNT project”).

When I arrived on campus the night before the prank, the 24-year-old ringleader led me on a reverent tour of the headquarters for UBC’s 3,600 engineering students—a red-and-white monstrosity, squat and ugly next to a row of elegant West Coast Modern masterpieces. Under my feet, the beer-coated floor of the common area made a distinctive snick, snick, snick as I followed Johnson’s shock of hair to a wall of class photographs, some dating to the 1930s. Students in natty red outfits stared back at us, an army of highly skilled practical jokers.

We ducked behind a plain wooden door. Inside, the place had all the look of a special-ops headquarters. Selections from the Canadian criminal code had been photocopied on the wall under the heading “430: MISCHIEF.” There was a book called The Complete Guide to Knots and Knot Tying on a table, and about 60 yards of multicolored climbing rope. On the floor was a giant gleaming metal hook, roughly finished and measuring about three feet long. Nine attentive students conversed around a low table, shuffling through 8-by-10 photos of the Lions Gate Bridge’s roadbed, roadside handrail, pedestrian walkway, walkway guardrail and structural details beneath the guardrail. It was like the Rebel Alliance poring over blueprints of the Death Star.

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7 Comments

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jacubious

08/19/08 at 6:02 pm

Haha, I think its funny that I had just written a comment about how UBC was left out of the other prank article.....

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Zilchy Zup

08/21/08 at 6:33 pm

Great inspirational article for people like me, who love to play pranks and think outside the box.

I mean, what's life without the thrill of doing adding fun? We, the next generation, must take back our world!!!

Hint: try buying 100 gift cards, and filling each one with 1 cent. Then use couple pounds of plastic that you just got for $1 and make something useful!

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cup c

09/21/08 at 3:42 pm

Come on, this "prank" has been done before, get a life guys...also just in case anyone is curious, there planning the same stunt for same time same place next year.

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seamountie

11/02/08 at 11:48 am

This was an interesting article, but either the editor or the author (or both) need to have their typing fingers rapped. Only in one place in this article did the author get the name of the bridge right. Not every suspention bridge in the world is called Golden Gate. The bridge in the article is the LIONS GATE BRIDGE. To get such a basic fact messed up not only throws the article but the whole site/magazine into disrepute. Not good for an journal that avers the title 'Scientific'.

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bobbyparks

01/26/09 at 11:16 am

We know our bridges.

Seamountie -- thanks for calling my article interesting. But on your criticism, you're way off -- my typing digits are fine. This article describes an incident that occurred in Feb., 2008 on the Lion's Gate Bridge. At one point, the article mentions that the same band of merry pranksters pulled off a high-profile stunt in 2001 at the Golden Gate bridge. Nowhere else do we reference the Golden Gate prank. Perhaps you read the article too fast?

PopSci has over a dozen copyeditors and fact-checkers on staff. The editors comb the story in five different stages over three months. The fact checkers call everyone mentioned in the story and read them back the content. Then they call their own secondary sources to double check that work. They called me at 10 pm one night to challenge something I wrote. It's a huge pain in the rear for the writer. But that's probably why there has never been a glaring error that ended up in a PopSci feature I've written (OK, a few wayward commas.) Despite the hassle, it's a great system.

While interviewing this top-secret British Columbia crew, it was hard not to become inspired by their good spirit. They remind me of a quote in an old Tom Robbins book: "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

Does anyone have any questions about standing around on a cold bridge at 4 a.m. waiting for some rowdy college students to drive up?

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:40 am

Hello....the title of your article says that Canadian students hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge. Ummm... I think you mean the Lion's Gate Bridge!!!!!!! You really should fix this mistake, it really kinda looks bad.

Thanks.

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cml

02/02/09 at 11:46 am

oops, sorry, I too read the article too quickly. it's just that it looks bad to have "Golden Gate Bridge" in the title and then immediately below there is a picture of the Lion's Gate Bridge. But if Canadians indeed hung a car from the Golden Gate Bridge, that's good!!