Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/17/worlds-largest-penny-pyramid.html
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That’s worth it’s weight in copper.
ETA:
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The cool thing about this is that it cost over ten thousand bucks to construct, but after you get the recognition and world fame and get bored of it, you can just knock it down like a Tibetan mandala then head over to the bank and get all your money back (or rather converted into larger bills).
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I like the patterns made with alternating shiny pennies with dirty ones. That was a nice touch. The timelapse was a little playful, too. I guess you need to have some fun in order to prevent the mind from completely numbing over when doing something so tedious for so long.
It was nice that he controlled the lighting for the timelapse. So many are ruined by jumping flickering light sources.
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“and took approximately 425 days off during the construction”
What is this “day off” of which he speaks?
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Man, I wish I could save ten grand over that sort of timescale.
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And here I thought that any penny pyramid would be the biggest penny pyramid.
Goes ta’ show ya’, or well, I guess, me.
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In case people start to feel ambitious.
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If he spent 1.8 man-years over the course of 3 years, that’s fourteen hours and twenty-four minutes of penny-stacking, on average, every day for three years.
6 minutes, and I don’t even get to see him kick it down at the end?
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Well, I know what the next bot I build is going to do.
What I’m fascinated by is that the pyramid created by those 11-penny stacks appears taller than it is wide. The actual diameter-to-thickness ratio of a penny is a little over 13:1. A 13-penny stack should create a fairly square pyramid. 11-penny stacks should create a squat pyramid that’s noticeably wider than it is tall. But instead, it looks stretched.
An 11-penny stack creates the illusion of being taller than it is wide. (A “square” 13-penny stack looks ridiculously tall compared to width.) But at that scale and distance the cylinder illusion shouldn’t be coming into play.
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I mean, I know it’s a gargantuan amount of fairly small objects to arrange in one place, but intuitively, it doesn’t seem like making a stack of anything less than 4 feet tall would take literal years. Wow.
Cool end result. Wonder if he had any minor catastrophes, “coinslides” from someone kicking a corner or the like.
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So he was stacking approximately 25 coins per minute during the build. Or around two and a half stacks. Given the the need to pick out the coins and sort them and work out the spacing that sounds pretty reasonable.
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Those could be zinc pennies.
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It should be plain enough that this guy spends a lot of time alone.
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Trying to imagine how one would keep a relationship or marriage going…
“Sorry honey I can’t come to bed I have to stack pennies in the basement now”
“Sorry honey I know you’re aroused right now but I have to go stack pennies and the basement now”
Also how does somebody take 425 days off in 3 years and have a job that doesn’t immediately fire them?
This is an odd dream to pursue but congratulations to him that is an impressive feat he deserves some recognition for that and I wish I could see him jump in like Scrooge McDuck
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Guessing he’s retired. Probably has a pretty strong back too, leaning over a hundred thousand times.
I could beat this in a day with a pick-and-place robot with a funnel to a Penny coin Hopper. I could do it with dimes quarters whatever I just couldn’t afford to make it this big.
If a bank let me do it inside the bank with their own money as a display I could make it as big as you can imagine or the floor could hold using this method with very little effort. It could run 24/7 as an art piece showing something like the bank’s interest rate as a physical art piece of what happens when you save with them or something
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And then, deconstruct it and start digging a hole in the floor to illustrate what happens when bank fees are included. 
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