Has anyone started organizing the DIY reality-TV-style competition where various makers have to build a guillotine with only 600$?

It's one of those things I don't want to actually do or be known as the person who did but I keep looking at Lowes with lust in my heart. It's doable, damn it!

Most of it is pretty simple. A bit of 2x4 and some long screws to fit it all together, a rope and pulley to raise the blade, some shaped wood for the head-holdy part.

The hard part is definitely the blade.

but I figure they've got sheet metal, and you could get a bench-mount grinder, and sharpen the edge. You'd get an early-style guillotine, not one with an angled blade, but it'd work well enough.

The metal isn't going to be heavy enough on its own, though, since it's probably too thin. You'd want to get some weighs of some sort to improve the cutting ability. You might just attach some bricks or a cinderblock to it.

But this is the sort of thing I'd want to see out of the competition: there'd be different approaches, different design styles, different limitations and features.

so it'd have a real competition element. We could get Adam Savage to come out and test them all on mannequins, and evaluate how good they are at cutting, how much maintenance they need, how easy they are to use, and added features.

"Most competitors went for very heavy blades, to make up for the thin and not terribly sharp blades they had to use, which resulted in some interesting optimizations for the rope."

"Steve here we can see just used a standard rope and eyelet, which makes it quite hard to raise the blade. They didn't think to provide a place to tie it off, either, so premature... "release" is quite possible. Not great, Steve."

"Dan, you've got a complex pulley system here, want to talk us through that?"
"Yeah! I started with an eyelet but it had too much friction, so I switched to a pulley. I realized if I'm doing that, I could use more complex pulleys, and make it easier to raise."

"Sara, want to talk us through your system? I saw you testing it earlier, it's very impressive"
"Like a lot of designers I went for the simple single-pulley system at first, but it's very heavy. I had some money left over, so I adapted a garage-door-motor to raise the blade."

"Very fancy, but it does mean your guillotine is the only one that needs power to work..."
"Yeah, that's definitely a drawback. I'm thinking for the Robotspierre 2.0 I'll optimize the price a bet better so I can afford a battery pack, giving it portability"

"Alex, you have a very unique and striking guillotine, what lead you to go for all-metal?"
"Well, I was seeing how most people went for wooden frames, and while that's got obvious benefits in terms of ease of machining and cost, I wanted to try something more portable."

"Portable, you say?"
"Yeah, most of these guillotines weigh quite a lot and are very inflexible. Unless you've got a flatbed truck, they're difficult to move around. Some of the modular ones can be disassembled and fit in a van or pickup... but they are still very heavy"

"Yeah, Joe's team had to get help from two other teams just to get it moved to the judging stand."
"Exactly. So I spent more money on some pre-cut aluminum and steel, and while that meant there was much less for the blade and other parts, it means it's foldable and lightweight"

"Very nice, I'm sure the rest of the judges will find a way to give you more points for those outside-the-box considerations. It may not be the sharpest or the easiest to reset, but it's the only one that one person can pack away in a trunk and drive away with."

"Karin, you have another very unique looking... guillotine? guillotines? What inspired this design?"
"It was actually a mistake which lead us to build it this way! We special-ordered some extra-thick steel, but we thought we'd get extra weight by making it taller..."

"Yeah, makes sense, but it's not exactly tall..."
"Exactly! They messed up, and sharpened the long side. We would have had to spend a lot of money to get the tools to cut the steel... but then we had an insight: why not turn this mistake into a positive?"

"And that's why you build the only combo-guillotine in the competition!"
"Yep. We figure one blade can detach many heads at once, so why not design it for that purpose? We may have a slower "reload" time than other designs, but our throughput is great, since we can do 4 at once."

"I think Jill's team was thinking about a similar sort of multi-guillotine setup, but they were mounting the heads vertically. "
"Yeah, they switched away from that design because it required way more weights or height, and it was overly complicated to load. They had ladders!"

"And Glenn, we've got to give you some kind of bonus award for your model. It may not be the best or the fastest or the easiest, but we gotta give you some kind of economy award. What was your final total on this?"
"152 and 68 cents, Adam!"

"Amazing! It's a unique look, but we saw in the pre-testing that it still works."
"Yep, figuring out that I could use a replacement blade off a lawn mower was the main breakthrough. Once you've got that, it vastly cuts down on the amount of work and tools you need."

"I can see, this is a very simple model, some of these parts still have price tags on them!"
"Yep. Other than a hammer for the nails and a handsaw, there's no tools needed. It's all off-the-shelf parts!"

"How do you think the reliability will be? I mean, you're holding a blade onto a cinderblock with zip-ties, do you think those will snap sooner rather than later?"
"Yes, that's definitely a weak point, but the nice thing is that they're easily replicable. "

"Good point, you can just apply more zip-ties when some of them snap."
"Yeah, or just wait for full failure, then re-apply a full set of them. You'll have to swap out the lawnmower blade every hundred heads or so, anyway. It's only 5 minutes of downtime, anyway."

ANYWAY I'm not necessarily saying you should go behead the aristocracy... but I'd definitely watch this show. Probably not compete, this kind of mechanical design is not my strong point, but I'd enjoy seeing how experts approach it.

And it's one of those things that can only help relations between the working class and the aristocracy.
Knowing that people can easily, cheaply, and quickly build a guillotine might make some mega-rich people reconsider a policy or two.

anyway the annoying thing is that I had on my todo list for today to go to a home improvement store to pick up some things, but now if I do it I'm gonna be looking at parts I shouldn't be, and someone might have alerted the police to show up and question me.