Author: nlewkowitz

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Canoe Nearing Completion

The first cardboard boat was completely assembled this afternoon. Now the students need to spend time painting the skin with polyurethane sealant to keep out the water. After it is sealed, they will then paint the boat with some sort of color scheme, and from our discussions it appears they want to try and make it look like a leaf. Should be interesting. The cardboard boat races are just over a week away, so I think they are in a decent place to get it completed and ready for the water. A few photos below.

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Locker Badges

This week I have the freshmen. My co teacher and I switch each week who is teaching them. Since our classroom has lockers, we decided to have them make their own locker badges. We created a template file for Inkscape, and then I created a video to show them how to complete the file and send it to the laser cutter. The video includes how to vectorize a photo of themselves to place on the locker badge as well as adding text for their name. It’s a relatively quick little project, but gives them a sense of ownership within the shop. I’ll take some more photos of all the completed badges in the next few days. For now, here is a link to the project page.

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SumoBots

Today the Sumobots finally did some battle against each other. There were several entries from our student teams, which included names such as Bozo Bot, Mama Tipson, Connoli, Open-Faced Sandwich, Reverse Sandwich, and Kendo(Revived). Many of the bots were not as fully developed as the students wanted, but they are learning the difficulties of creating a fully autonomous robot from scratch. My favorite bot had to be Kendo(Revived) which is far and away the most advanced bot of the group. It features a plasma and waterjet steel scraper and jaw to remove combatants from its path, and is build on a solid foundation with triple traction wheels and custom circuit board. Additionally, the students were adding small magnets to get the bot to the heaviest allowable weight for combat. We had a lot of fun watching the robots today, and will probably have another day of bouts in the next few weeks, which will allow students to update their robots and make them better.

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KIJD

Ash and I took the Archer to KIJD this morning. It’s a small airport in Northern Connecticut. The flight out was uneventful, the air seemed pretty calm at that time of day. We landed without issue and found a parking place on the ramp. We took a short walk down the street to the Aero Diner. A small 50’s diner where we had breakfast. The food was typical diner food, and we enjoyed the meal. The staff was very busy, but courteous. Afterwards we headed back to the airport and took off for our flight back to Marshfield. We were unable to get flight following, seems like the Memorial Day air traffic had caught up with controllers and we were kicked off with ATC. No big deal, we just kept our eyes open and headed home. The air was a bit more bouncy on the way home, but no big deal. Some slight gusting on landing made the touchdown a little more bouncy than usual, but nothing uncomfortable. All in all it was a fun day for flying.

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Basement

We did some more work on the basement today. Ash took off the doors to the cabinets in preparation for painting. I spent most of the morning watching F1 and then the play in game between Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest. Spent some time preparing for our flight tomorrow morning. Weather looks good.