asbestosman

It all started one day when I had placed the beer bottles on the floor next to my computer desk in a ten-pin bowling arrangement. Someone called it a beer pyramid, which of course it was not, it was a triangle. A beer pyramid, we discussed, would need to have several layers. It wouldn't stand unless you had something supporting the bottles. A layer of cardboard between each layer of bottles would do it.
Unless someone noticed that I was wearing that look that means I'm gonna take something too far, no one expected it to go any further.

A few days later I got a pizza box and cut it into triangles and built this:



Nice, huh? Yeah, it's okay. It gets in the way, though, and I'm afraid it'll topple. Plus, it could be bigger, if I put it in a more appropriate place.

By the next time we had a party I'd collected some more bottles and expected to have a lot more by the end of the night. Blair and I cut up a slab box (a pizza box isn't big enough for the lower layers) and went into the front yard to look for a place for it, but couldn't find a nice flat spot. A bottom layer of cardboard wouldn't provide a strong enough foundation. Then it occurred to me: Parketry! A long time ago Danny and Simon were in K-Mart and picked up a packet of parketry because it was only $2. Of course they had no use for it at all, so it had faded into the junk that accumulates in the house.
The parketry would provide the perfect base. Blair and I assembled the Byramid, but I thought it was lacking something, and besides, we would surely have a surplus of bottles by the end of the night. So I cut up some more pizza box to add turrets. It looked like this:



Here, Blair estimates the eventual height of the top foundation:



Well, it was a nice plan, but unfortunately the party was the afterparty for Romeo and Julian (Romeo and Juliet, only gayer. It was really gay), and few people were drinking beer, and the ones who were were drinking boutique beers that didn't have the bottle size we needed. So the Byramid didn't get much bigger than that, and over the next couple of weeks completely collapsed due to rain.

We could rebuild it, but what's the point when it's just going to collapse again? We needed something with greater structural integrity. But what could be use that was thin, strong and could be cut to the correct dimensions?
My housemate Danny has been doing a job that involves going to hardware stores and demonstrating how fantastic this paint is because you only need one layer or something... I dunno. Anyway, he's been demostrating this on MDF boards.
Perfect! I had already bought a saw to build a wooden support for my girlfriend's bed, which we broke recently (), so we had all the materials and tools we needed.

Last Saturday, work began at around 5pm (with a beer in hand, of course) on what would become the most ambitious Byramid project ever undertaken, that I know of.

We had to extend the parketry foundation a little. Here you can see the bottom layer already arranged, Danny holding an MDF board and the piles of bottles, which I have sorted according to label (Carlton Draft pile not pictured):

I measured the bottles on the bottom layer to find the necessary size for each piece of MDF.

Danny saws while Ben outlines according to my measurements:



A rather blurry second layer:


Due to how many we had of each, it was decided the layers would go Carlton, Tasman, Boags, Tasman, Carlton, Tasman....
Unfortunately we were a couple of Boags short by layer 7. We thought we'd have to go get and drink a six pack, but then Ben realised we didn't NEED to have the correct bottles on the inside, just the outside. That still left us a couple short, though. We would have to retrieve some Boags from the layer we'd already placed and built on top of, and replace them with Carlton bottles:

Easy enough. We were able to complete the second and final layer of Boags.

Whew!

Tom arrived just in time to take a photo of use each placing one bottle on the penultimate layer:


and of course, I got to place the last bottle (a larger one we had lying about in the yard):


If you look closely, you can see where we replace the Boags with Carltons on the inside.

I'm hiding in this photo. Can you find me?

Yes, it is leaning a bit.

I still want to add turrets to it. Look how cool it looked on Byramid mk2.