Boys show impressive engineering skills in the Weizmann Safe Cracking competition

Two teams of Lower Sixth boys from Tonbridge took part in the annual national Weizmann Safe Cracking competition, hosted at Dulwich College. The event challenged students to combine creativity, engineering skill and physics knowledge in a fast-paced environment.

The competition required each team to design and build a “Bank Safe” that could only be opened by solving a series of physics-based riddles and problems. Once completed, teams were tasked not only with defending their own safes but also with attempting to break into those designed by other schools. Success depended on both the ingenuity of the safe’s design and the clarity and rigour of the scientific challenges it presented.

Preparation for the competition began in September, when the boys started developing their initial designs. Construction of the safes took place after the Christmas break, with teams refining their mechanisms, testing security features and ensuring their physics problems were both solvable and challenging.
Tonbridge entered two teams in this year’s competition and, throughout the day, the boys demonstrated impressive teamwork and problem-solving skills, with one of the teams, named Cooke’s Arcade, placing second overall out of 32 teams.