Merlo helps solve Scrapheap Challenge!

Channel 4 TV’s ever popular engineering game show hits UK screens in Spring 2007 for an unprecedented ninth series, this time with help from Merlo UK. Two teams have just ten hours to build mad-cap machines using just the junk that they can scavenge from a Scrapheap. Many of the challenges dreamed up for this series were also on a grand scale - and big challenges meant big items on the Scrapheap – many of which were too big for the teams to shift using the quad bikes that are provided as part of their standard kit.

Lucky then that Merlo UK loaned the production team a P40.14K! The Production team were full of praise for their new work horse – Series Producer Dominic Bowles said that the Merlo had been used so frequently that they’d invented a new verb – to ‘Merlo’ it! You’ll catch glimpses of the Merlo doing its stuff on screen when series nine begins airing.

On the last day of shooting two giant paddle ships were ‘Merlo’d’ into Hawley Lake near Yateley in Hampshire. Scrapheap Challenge had set it’s very own Transatlantic Challenge and The NERDS (a team of computer scientists from Boston, USA) and the Clagsters (steam enthusiasts from Dorset) were challenged to build Paddle Steamers to cross the ‘Scrapheap Atlantic’ from Bristol to New York and back. It was actually from a balsa wood model of the Clifton Suspension Bridge to a plastic Statue of Liberty and back!

Scrapheap’s Head of Engineering, Hadrian Spooner, was the main user of the loaned Merlo, clocking up some 250 hours on the machine and prompting Production Manager Gemma Daly to claim ‘He practically lives in it!’ Hadrian’s verdict was ‘Superb, we could not have managed this series without it. Every year the challenges become more complex and seem to involve bigger and even heavier items. The Merlo doesn’t struggle to lift what it says it can, and it does it precisely and smoothly which is essential. And, for all its formidable lifting ability it’s still compact and manoeuvrable around the scrap yard – that’s a very, very important safety factor in a dangerous environment.’

And as for that Transatlantic paddle boat challenge – we do know the result, but you’ll have to wait for the show to find out – believe us it’s worth waiting for!

Jan 2007

The UK ‘Clagster’ team

Lowering the UK’s steamer

Hadrian (left) and presenter Robert Llewellen

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