Original subtitles

[upbeat music]

[narrator] On this episode of How Tech Works,

we take a tour

of a maze of man-made caves

in Nottingham.

[David] Beneath our feet we’ve got about 500 man-made caves.

[narrator] And...

This unique abode

proves that recycling on a grand scale

can work

if you don't mind living in a former dumpster.

[upbeat music continues]

Hi there, my name is Basil Singer

and you lucky viewers

are in for a tech-filled treat.

For the next half an hour

we're going to train

with the super elite team of athletes.

Cyclists to be exact.

Thanks to the latest in high-tech training gear.

Plus,

we'll hop on an incredibly fast motorcycle

with three wheels.

Talk about a mighty trike.

But first,

England's Nottingham

is most often associated with

that legendary outlaw.

Twang. Robin Hood.

Today it's a city of 350,000 people.

But many locals are not aware

that beneath the urban center,

lies a vast maze of man-made caves.

Let's take a sneak peek.

[soft uplifting music]

[narrator] David Walker can tell you

Nottingham has been around for a long time.

[David] There's been a town on this site

since Anglo-Saxon times

so probably the 7-8th century AD,

or like that.

And then,

the town expanded after the Norman conquest

in 1066 when William the Conqueror

put a castle on the hill.

[narrator] He also knows something few others do.

There is no obvious signs of caves in most of the city,

but beneath our feet we've got about 500

man-made sandstone caves.

So this is High Pavement,

the oldest part of the city,

the Anglo-Saxon part of the city,

fifty six has got a cave, 54 has got a cave.

Fifty two and 50 have got caves.

Forty eight has got a cave, not sure about these two.

That one's got a cave but we haven't been down it yet.

The cafe's got a cave.

The three buildings next to it

have got caves which all interlink and inter-mingle.

And that's the Gallery of Justice,

the Old Shire Hall, the County Hall,

that's got caves dating back to certainly medieval.

It's wonderful. There's cave, dungeons,

passages, all sorts under there.

[narrator] David is an archeologist.

He's surveying and mapping the caves

and their locations with reference to the city surface.

Today,

he's checking out The Old Angel Inn,

one of the oldest and reportedly haunted pubs in town.

[David] We're surveying with a laser scanner

which fires out a beam of

laser light and measures distances and angles,

from that we can build up a cloud

of millions and millions of survey points.

[narrator] He works his way outside in,

scanning the streets and the building.

Then exploring and mapping the caves below.

Cave by cave,

he's creating a digital detailed history of this city.

[David] There's pub cellars,

there's meat cellars,

a butcher's cave.

We've got tanneries with many, many pits cut into the ground.

Malt kilns which are a bit of a Nottingham specialty.

They were brewing beer

nearby and malting the grain for that

underground where the temperature is constant

so you could malt in the summer as well as the winter.

[narrator] The caves begin just two or three meters down.

[David] Nottingham Castle sandstone,

it's very soft.

You can carve it with your thumb pretty much,

you can cut your own cave with a hammer and chisel.

It's really strong as well.

The castle sandstone is sedimentary rock

so it's layers of sand that have been laid down

at the bottom or rivers and seas.

And those layers are very thick ,

so as long as you cut within the layers

or within only a few layers,

and cut yourself and nice arch or dome shape,

you've got an incredibly strong structure.

[narrator] Some caves stand alone,

others form elaborate networks under several buildings.

There's some evidence of man-made changes.

We've got different tool markings,

we've got this much rougher bigger tool marking here

which leads me to believe this is

World War II for air raid shelters,

expanded for an air raid shelter.

And rather than the neat tool marking

you get in the rest of the cave,

it seems more of thicker lines

which is certainly done with a mechanical drill

or a rock drill

coming down rather than

hammer and chisel.

[narrator] Many caves have ghostly reminders

of their more recent use.

[uplifting music] Some speak to happier times.

[David] Sixteenth, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries

we see people starting to use them for leisure purposes

like wine cellars

and lounge caves

and then follies and summer houses as well.

[narrator] This cave under The Old Angel was at one time

good old fashioned storage.

[David] So up there, that's the level of the

pub floor and the street.

And your beer from a barrel is just dropped from the top

and goes down there and drops to the bottom.

And you stick it one side,

leave it to settle for three weeks before

you can drink it.

[narrator] The scanner records an astonishing amount of data

resulting in incredible 3D portraits

of this underground world.

You can see the bits of modern brick work,

we can see individual tool marks and so forth.

And if we zoom into it,

we can see it's going to,

here it looks like a solid mass of wall.

But if we zoom in, we can see what we're actually looking at

which is just points, individual survey points.

[narrator] To make the images more life-like,

he takes digital photos from the same scanner positions

and overlays them.

The result is like a Davinci,

in a fraction of the time

it would have taken the old master to paint it.

[David] We can link a lot of those together

so we can work from surface levels

down through a cave or building right down to the cave below.

[narrator] But there's a lot more work to do.

We've got a tiny little hole up here

which connects it,

which connects this cave

to The Old Angel second set of caves

which are above

and running off that way somewhere.

There's a shaft there, probably another beer drop

and another set of caves over there.

[narrator] David's recording history

that's already vanishing.

We know for certain that about 80 or maybe 100 of them

are lost one way or another.

So either fully destroyed by either

by buildings being built on top of them or through them

or filled with concrete

or bricked and blocked up such that

there wasn't any access.

But the real dangers are the caves

we don't know about.

There must be caves under some buildings

that we have no record of.

[narrator] If they do exist,

he's determined to find them.

[David] This is one just fairly

normal building in Nottingham,

so if you multiply that by

one hundred or maybe by 500

every one of these caves has a story to tell

and it's always a different story

or a slightly different story, but a different story.

Now, if you think walking through

a labyrinth of dark caves is cramped and crowded,

just wait until you see how the fellow

in our next story makes his home.

What's that saying about one man's rubbish

is being another mans... castle?

No, that's not it.

Have a look at this.

[upbeat music]

[narrator] This is not your ordinary rubbish bin.

And Greg Kloehn is not your ordinary artist.

You're probably looking at the nicest

garbage can in the world.

[narrator] Don't call him a "bin man"

or a "trash collector".

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

[narrator] Although that just happens to be his passion.

A couple windows, perfect.

My fascination with garbage is

we throw so much of this away in this society

and it's wasteful

and a little shameful.

[narrator] He was tired of seeing people discard

valuable pieces of trash

outside their homes.

So Greg decided

to show that a rubbish bin can actually

be a home.

I am playing with an object that

is seen as just a receptacle for garbage.

And I've transformed it into an object

as a vessel of life.

[electronic music]

[narrator] Greg's an artist

with one goal.

[Greg] It is part of the craft to take something

and transform it.

To have someone's eye read it as a different shape.

As a different function.

[narrator] And he's applying that notion to the home.

[Greg] What's a home? That's a good question.

I think for everyone it's a different thing.

It's a location, it's a smell,

it's a kitchen, it's a toilet,

it's a shower.

[narrator] And yes, it's trashy creation has it all.

[Greg] It was a challenge to me,

how could I turn this one object into a home?

I knew I had little space to do it,

the square footage,

but to really make it work.

Welcome to my luxury dumpster home.

Come on in, let's take a look.

[electronic music] [narrator] No stone

or rubbish pile left unturned,

Greg recreates all the creature-comforts of home.

We'll start with the kitchen, the most important place

in any house, everyone spends the most time there.

So let's scoot over and go to the kitchen.

[narrator] It comes complete with a toaster oven,

a sink, a single burner stove

and of course, a refrigerator.

It just runs off ice, not electric.

[narrator] There's also a propane tank underneath

and it's stored under the granite counter top.

But no rubbish disposal.

After a nice dinner,

everyone needs a good night's sleep.

So the seat backs transform into the bedroom.

At night time,

on here and the door when is closed.

You have two of these and that makes up your bed.

[narrator] Now, I know what you're wondering about.

And no, he hasn't forgotten about that either.

One thing that is important to everybody in a home,

is the rest-room.

This also has one.

Here we have the toilet.

[narrator] It can hook up to a septic tank or compost system.

And for the rest of the plumbing,

a pipe system on the ceiling can hold about six gallons of water.

We spare no expense in the dumpster home,

only the best. [electronic music]

[narrator] But enough of the necessities,

this is a luxury rubbish bin.

Greg has got all of the extras.

A shower,

a flower bed,

a sun deck.

Setting up a rubbish bin home

sure works up a hunger.

So the barbeque is the final tasty touch.

[Greg] Luxury living in a dumpster,

here's how we do it.

[narrator] It's safe to say that Greg's not a starving artist.

And not a scrap of food goes to waste.

Greg hopes his converted rubbish bin helps people learn

a little more about themselves.

I've had a lot of inspiration

from the homeless people on the street.

I look what they take,

almost every night they're grabbing

items dumped on the street,

configuring them in a way to make a shelter

just for that evening.

I think if we really made a home on our own,

we would be different.

We would look at things a bit different,

what you need and what you want.

[electronic music] Coming up on How Tech Works.

We try not to hit the wall

with the SpiderTech cycling team's

brand new training system.

And, we take a different kind of spin

in a unique vehicle called the Trey-cycle.

Find out what sets it apart.

[electronic music]

Welcome back

to How Tech Works,

I'm Basil Singer.

Now when it comes to a pro-athletes training program,

a lot of sports have adopted high tech components

to achieve maximum performance results.

So we wanted to check out the latest

gear used by a team of elite cyclists.

But I'm not going into that spandex!

Oh no, our intrepid reporter, Dan Riskin,

in on the scene.

Let's see if he can keep up with team SpiderTech.

Three...two...one...off you go.

[electronic music]

[Dan] Canada's Pro-Continental cycling team,

team SpiderTech,

and the team hopes to permanently etch

this country on the world cycling map.

Key to that,

is developing elite level athletes

with the help of a brand new high tech training system.

Today I've come to check it out for myself.

I am with former Tour de France leader,

Olympic medalist,

Canadian cycling icon, Steve Bauer.

Steve, what are we looking at?

This is a SpiderTech power watch training system,

it's a computerized system that picks up

the data from the rider's performance.

It can pick up their power or speed of the RPMs,

the cadence left and right,

to see if they're in balance.

[Dan] Which foot is going in which time?

[Steve] Yes, to make sure they're 50% power on both legs.

It's a lot of data that's really important

in performance cycling.

And of course for team SpiderTech,

it's a great training facility for these guys

to test and monitor performances over time.

Great, it looks like fun.

Do you think there's a chance I could go?

I think we better put you on the bike and give it a go.

-For sure. -I like it.

[futuristic music]

[Dan] Elite athlete?

Maybe not, but today

this system is about to get all the Dan Riskin

it can handle.

[Steve] Dan, you're looking like a pro now.

I'm feeling pretty good.

So, this is the magical bike,

can you show me the sensors?

The heart of the SpiderTech

is back here on the plate.

So you pull it off

you can see that's where the power structure is

is placed, the horse power of the rider,

and then they have the sensors down here

which monitor the cadence

or what they call the spin-scan.

Or the balance of the power of the rider's left and right leg.

So those are the two main sensors that pick up

and produce data

into the computer where we can record it.

Okay cool, how about I take it for a spin?

-Give it a shot. -Okay, let's see.

[futuristic music]

I'll give you on a one, two, three

and I want you to stand up and give it a kick.

-Just really power into it. -Okay.

One...two...three...okay give it a go,

come on give it a sprint, coming to the line,

you're going to win that jersey

You're going to win, alright!

[Dan] Pushed to the limit, the system measures my every move.

And I can see it all on the screen in real time.

Well, I could if I wasn't about to throw up.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, you're there at the finish line.

Good job.

Whoa!

So you want to see how much wattage?

If we go to the screen,

you can see that your peak watt,

you're maximum watts produced, 858 watts.

[Dan] Is that good?

I'd say that it's pretty darn good.

For a first go,

you can improve and when you come back

to the studio another time, it's going to be over 1000.

You're going to go home and do some training.

You see the thing is, I...

I have a knee injury.

Ahhh.

Hey there.

-Hey how's it going? -I'm Dan.'

I'm Lucas, pleasure to meet you.

-What have you got there? -This is SpiderTech

[Dan] SpiderTech is a form of kinesiology tape

that comes in pre-cut,

easy to apply patterns for just about

every part of the human body.

Designed with the same weight,

thickness and elasticity as the skin,

Lucas tells me that it adds stability to joints and muscles,

without affecting circulation

or range of motion.

Helping to reduce pain

and even improve performance.

So why are you putting it on your knee?

I'm putting it on my knee because

back in 2009 I had a near career-ending accident.

I was hit by a car while training,

I shattered my knee cap.

And people told me

you might think about another career.

Alright, so my knee isn't quite as

injured as yours but I do have a bum knee

and I feel that's holding me back from the performance

that I know is inside me.

So, do you think there is anyway

I can throw some of this on my knee

and thus achieve the Olympic results

that I think I'm capable of?

You know what, the Olympic results might take

you more determination and hard guts,

but the SpiderTech's going to help.

I think it's a matter of the tape.

Let's try the tape and see if I can be an Olympian

and we can try exercise as the last resort.

Got to start somewhere, right?

[uplifting music]

[Dan] Getting taped up by a trainer,

it's hard not to feel like a pro.

So I'm thinking,

why stop at the knee?

-Alright. -Alright Dan,

we're going to do it again, ready?

Three, two, one okay give it a shot.

Come on, come on, come on, go, go, go, go!

That's good, you're coming to the line.

One hundred more meters, yes you're going to get it.

-Yeah, alright, alright. -Whoa.

Good sprint.

Okay, so what do you say?

Am I ready for the Tour de France?

You know what, you improved a little bit, but...

You're going to need a little more work Dan.

Oh well, that's life. Thanks a lot.

-No problem. -That's great.

And finally,

we're wrapping up with a story show casing

a road warrior that is definitely turning heads.

A test spin along the Florida coast

puts out next self-taught engineer on the map

with his one of a kind vehicle

called the Trey-cycle.

[narrator] It's turning heads all over Florida.

A motorcycle with a twist.

[Ray] That's all I can think about,

I got to make these things safer.

[narrator] With this three-wheeled wonder,

bikers are getting an alternative.

Number one, safety. I said it had to have a frame.

That's the number one.

It's got to be stable, that's number two.

It's got to be comfortable, that's number three.

And it's got to have the power.

[narrator] It's called, the Trey-cycle,

and it does pack a lot of power.

It runs on a V6 engine

and customers are lining up.

Even at the garage.

Mike and Jody Bearle found the aerodynamic

three-wheeler online.

They're so intrigued,

they've come to Melbourne, Florida to give it a spin.

[engine]

-Just go easy. -I will.

[rock music]

I like that a lot.

That's cool!

[narrator] That's what Ray's banking on.

This self-taught engineer

wants to give riders the look

and the feel.

[Ray] It's all made out of 4130 chromoly

used in all the Formula 1 race cars and NASCAR cars.

When these guys hit a wall at 100 mile an hour,

they can get up and walk away.

We're just making sure it fits right.

And right now, it's not fitting right,

because we still have to make the cut-outs for the exhaust.

Once we cut those out, it will come down a bit more.

And then it will be in the perfect shape.

[narrator] While they're fitting one,

they tow another to the test track.

First, we get a 360 on the specs.

Starting with LED headlights.

There's one here, matching on the other side,

and there's one upfront, so we have three.

We want the traffic to really see us.

And they will.

We have a racing type formula fuel tank.

The tank holds 20 gallons.

We figure 800 miles on a tank with this engine.

The aerodynamics is

designed to push

everything together, so it doesn't want to do this.

And push down at high speeds.

This bumper does come off.

There's a pin here

and two receivers, one on this side

and one that side. You pull this pin,

this will come out

and you put your travel haul case back in.

Inside the engine compartment,

we kept it very neat.

There's hardly anything in the way of hoses and wires.

[narrator] With an automatic transmission,

this trike can be serviced anywhere.

Repairs and maintenance are no more than any car

you can take it any place.

[narrator] Adam Cherwinski is in the driving seat today.

As a NASA engineer on Ray's team,

he'll put the Trey-cycle to the test.

Just keep your eye on the oil pressure,

ensure the pressure stays up and the water temperature stays up,

if it goes over 200,

make sure the fans are kicking on.

If the fans don't kick on and it goes to 220,

cut her off and stop the test.

[engine]

[rock music]

[Adam] Bike's running great,

suspension's doing wonderful,

oil temp stayed right in,

nice and smooth, brakes worked great.

I think it's ready to deliver.

[narrator] Great news for Mike and Jody

who just couldn't resist another joy ride.

[Mike] That is amazing.

It's like...it's effortless.

[Ray] I want to get as many out there on the road as possible.

Not just to make the money,

the more people who are driving them,

the safer motor cyclists are going to be.

[electronic music]

Well I never thought I would see a NASA engineer

street legal race car.

But that's just one of the benefits of watching our show.

Alas, that's all the time we've got for today.

Thank you very much for watching How Tech Works,

I'm Basil Singer, see you next time.

[electronic ending music]