building project conceived by archaeologist Sajuki Yoshimura. It was originally planned as a 1 to 5 scale model of the Great Pyramid. Because of the limited budget, the size had to be drastically reduced when the price of limestone rose as the project gained publicity. A concrete foundation had to be poured as the selected site offered no bedrock basis. With the help of two cranes and a forklift, the pyramid was built to reach a height of , with a base. The structure was ultimately dismantled and hauled away. NOVA In 1992, Mark Lehner and stonemason Roger Hopkins conducted a three-week pyramid-building experiment for a NOVA television episode. They built a pyramid high by wide, consisting of a total of , or about 405 tons. It was made out of 186 stones weighing an average of 2.2 tons each. Twelve quarrymen carved 186 stones in 22 days, and the structure was erected using 44 men. They used iron hammers, chisels and levers (this is a modern shortcut, as the ancient Egyptians were limited to using copper and later bronze and wood). But Lehner and Hopkins did experiments with copper tools, noting that they were adequate for the job in hand, provided that additional manpower was available to constantly resharpen the ancient tools. They estimated they would have needed around 20 extra men for this maintenance. Another shortcut taken was the use of a front-end loader or fork lift truck, but modern machinery was not used to finish the construction. They used levers to lift the capstone to a height of . Four or five men were able to use levers on stones less than one ton to flip them over and transport them by rolling, but larger stones had to be towed. Lehner and Hopkins found that by putting the stones on wooden sledges and sliding the sledges on wooden tracks, they were able to tow a two-ton stone with 12 to 20 men. The wood for these sledges and tracks would have to have been imported from Lebanon at great cost since there was little, if any, wood in ancient Egypt. While the builders failed to duplicate the precise jointing created by the ancient Egyptians, Hopkins was confident that this could have been achieved with more practice. Great Pyramid Some research suggests other estimates to the accepted workforce size. For instance, physicist Kurt Mendelssohn calculated that the workforce