Tag: CAM

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The Ant

During the building of the canoe boats, there were apparently some ant explorers that made their way onto the cardboard during the gluing process. Unfortunately, for a few of the ants, the messy gluing technique created slow moving streams of glue that caught these ants unaware, and encased them forever in a sea of Elmers. The students, feeling bad about the situation, decided to commemorate these unlucky souls by creating a large cardboard ant that will be placed at the head of the boat during the races. The last few weeks of school can be a strange. A few photos below.

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More boats

Boat construction continued again today. With the school year winding down, students are either helping with the boats or beginning the monumental task of cleaning and organizing the shop. We have several students dedicated just to sorting bolts and nuts – for some reason they seem to enjoy it. We call it a Zen task. A few more photos of the boats today.

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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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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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Water Jet

With our seniors leaving yesterday, myself and another student took on the task of learning the waterjet machine. The process is fairly simple, as its a two dimensional cutting machine much like several others we have in the shop. The hard part is understanding all of its moving parts, as well as its antiquated operating system and software. That being said, we were able to cut some parts out of steel on our first try yesterday, so I think we at least have a good enough understanding to keep the machine running.