Suggestions to Preston Briggs
This site was last updated on February 15, 2008.
Mark Rudner built these Ricycles to support a friend's Ditch Day project, at Cal Tech. He explains:
Yesterday was Ditch Day at Caltech. Ditch Day is a tradition that goes back to a long time ago, when seniors decided to take the day off and go to the beach. Some underclassmen decided it would be funny to go and ransack the seniors' rooms while they were gone though, so in subsequent years the seniors started piling books and other heavy stuff in front of their doors to deter other kids from breaking in.
Slowly the tradition evolved over time until it became more of a game where seniors take the day off and go to the beach or some other fun place, and leave a bunch of fun stuff for the underclassmen to do. The activities left behind are still called "Stacks," but they don't always have to do with getting into the seniors' rooms.
A friend of mine decided he was going to leave a stack at his dorm with a them of speed/racing. The highlight of the stack was that he treated everyone who signed up for his stack to a race at this really cool indoor go-karting track in Orange. Before that though, he needed some other fun speed-related activities to keep them busy. Originally his idea was to have a man-powered chariot race and an R/C boat race, but by Monday he still hadn't started building the chariots. That's when I stepped in and offered to help, but without a full workshop and only two days it was pretty clear to me that there was little chance of turning out a quality product.
Instead, I convinced him to go for a more comical slant and we went to Toys R Us to buy little tricycles for the kids to race. After test driving all of their models, we settled on a pretty nice model (all metal frame, didn't bend as soon as we sat on it...). Of course I had to get him to let me trick them out before putting them in the stack :-) Naturally, I dubbed them "Ricycles," since many of their styling cues are taken from the "rice rockets" seen speeding all over Southern California.
