*Warlord’s Challenge*

By Jaden & Nerisa

19 October 2003

It was around 2130ish one night and War stuck a post up on the board entitled "thinking out of the box". Read the post. There was a picture of a box of candles, a box of matches, about 3’ of string and some thumbtacks. The challenge was to mount the candle vertically on a wall using ONLY the materials in the picture. NO tools, NO cheating. Well, the challenge was made. Went upstairs and Nerisa was doing homework on the couch. I gathered up the necessary stuff and she looked at me kinda weird. Then I told her about the challenge. So we thought about it for a couple of minutes and started.

Here’s what there is to work with.

We started by finding a clear spot on the wall. It’s almost as hard as finding a clear horizontal surface around here. Now, we wanted to light the candle too, so it needed to be away from the wall as much as possible.

We used 2 candles, the candle box, some of the string and 7 tacks. Started by tacking the candle box to the wall. Then ran string around the bottom of it for supports and tacked it to the wall. Look at the above pic. Pretty self-explanatory.

Sorry about the flash, but you can still see how it’s tacked to the wall.

Then using a 2^nd candle we lit it and dripped hot wax on the box and immediately stuck the 1^st candle in it. It cooled and was quite rugged. The candle was about 3" from the wall.

Then we lit it.

With the lights on

With the lights off

The candle reflecting on the wall lit up the room quite well. Let it burn for a while and felt the wall, it was still cold. HOOYEA!

The point was just to see how different people would do it. Quite a few Rubies did it and took pix or described their setup. That’s how we did it.

Learn how to think out of the box, it might just save your life someday.

Jaden & Nerisa