- Shipwrecked together on a desert island Richard Hammond and Tory Belleci use their science smarts to power up their island paradise. By harnessing the force of water Tory hopes their engineering know how can light up the island and attract the attention of passing ships. While Richard wants power for more selfish reasons. Can they use electricity to escape or is Richard getting too comfortable in his new home?
- For Richard, life is great. He has managed to build himself all the comforts of a modern life. Everything electric runs. He even has a toaster. He has figured out a way to generate power.
They catch the intruder, which was an above average sized chicken. Richard and Tory build a chicken coop , so they can have eggs. Richard decides to document the entire experience with the recording camera. He reckons people make money with this sort of stuff. He decides to film everything on his phone, which he found around the ship wreck, earlier on. The phone was dead, so Tory decides to build a battery. All they need is 2 types of metal and lots of acid. He gather the copper pennies from the boat's booze kitty, nails and wires. Last component was tonnes of yucca. The plan is to stick a nail at one end of the yucca and a copper penny at the other end and run a wire through it. The nail produces electrons and copper attracts it, now they have a current. They can use the current to charge the phone battery. They set up about 10 banks of this set up and finally get enough current to start charging the phone.
Tory wants to use the phone to find a signal, but there is none. Richard decides to use the phone to start making videos. He also decides to generate electricity, so he could charge his phone. He uses the alternator from the boat and wires it to the control panel from the ship's wheelhouse. The whole things works, but someone has to keep cracking the alternator by hand to keep it spinning and that's hard work. So, Richard decides to mechanize the process of power generation. There is a river flowing next to their beach house and they build a water wheel to harness its power to turn the alternator. Tory then rigs up a gear system to connect the water wheel to the alternator. They use bamboo to create an elaborate guttering to tap the river at its highest point and feed it to the water wheel. Richard gets the length of the guttering wrong and the water falls just ahead of the wheel. Eventually Tory helps him get it right and they are making power. Richard switches on all his appliances and puts too much electric load on the alternator, seizing it up. So now, they will have to build a bigger water wheel to overcome the electric-magnetic field inside the alternator and restart it.
Richard was in charge of building a bigger wheel, which took a while. Tory wanted to build a lighthouse, so ships sailing by at night can see them. He gets a spotlight that they salvaged from the boat. They need a lens to focus the light. Tory decides to make a lens since there is sand everywhere. But Tory needs a kiln to melt the sand, and for that they need clay. Ants use clay build their nests. They find an ants nest in the forest. They turn out to be fire ants. They start biting. Tory builds his kiln. They need 3000 degrees F to melt glass. Tory designs a Fresnel lens, which is a set of prisms interconnected together to focus the light into a beam that can travel a large distance. They need 48 prisms. He makes a cutoff from wood, and then wraps clay around it to make a mold. They will fill the mold with sand and heat it to make glass. But the kiln is not hot enough. Richard suggests that glass itself melts at 2200 degrees F, and so they can use all the broken glass bottles they have collected and melt those to make prisms. After many more attempts, Tory makes a prism. They need to smash the glass into finer bits and cook it slower to get it cleaner and smoother. After hundreds of more attempts, and then polishing and refining the glass, Tory finally has 48 usable prisms. Tory assembles that Fresnel lens and installs it. But now Tory wants a rotating light, as a static beam wont attract attention. Richard decides to design the rotation system. But Richard doesn't want to use electricity, so decides to create a mechanical system that works on gravity. Tory needs to lay in a hammock to make the system work. But the drawback is that once the hammock reaches the bottom, Tory has to run to the top of the lighthouse, get into the other hammock and ride it all the way down. He gets 20 mins of sleep in each cycle.
The duo also make a bigger water wheel to power the lighthouse bulb. Their new wheel draws 45 amps from the alternator at full capacity and lights up the entire beach house. Life on the island was good. But Tory is not getting any sleep as the lighthouse is keeping him up. He then finds the Sail hidden behind some trees, at the edge of the beach. Tory is convinced that there is someone on the beach besides them.
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