Lately, I find myself making doodles of dragster designs…

I’m especially interested in drive-train details.

Special shout-out to Michael Earle and the rest of our pals at the Internet Archive for donating all the obsolete parts from their junk pile. It’s the mother lode of fans, trays, and power supplies.

We’re still trying to get ready (if you know how to collect 200 empty Odwalla bottles, I’d like to hear about it) for the Maker Faire. It looks like we’ll get everything done just in time. We’re hoping to have samples of the TSH3 to show, but there have been a couple of delays… can’t you just feel the late nights coming on?

I whacked up a poster for our play area at the faire. It uses the new logo (even though it’s not finished yet) and came out pretty nice. Using the logo in different situations has helped to figure out what needs refinement.

Anyway, you can read all about it on the Maker Faire site. Needless to say, we’re super excited (and we almost have enough Odwalla juice bottles collected, but if you have 20-50 lying around waiting to go to the recycle center, let me know and we’ll come pick ‘em up).

That’s right folks, we finally settled on the dates for the summer sessions this year.

This time there’s going to be two sessions! Twice the fun!

Session 1 - Fully Booked!
July 23 to July 29
Building Toys (gizmo utility belts, wind-up monsters, musical devices, etc.)

Session 2
July 30 to August 5
Building Vehicles (alternative fuels from gravity to rubber-band power)
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Since every session is an experiment, we’re going to try something new; this year we are thinking that Session 1 will be more suited to the younger tinkerers (suggested age range 7 to 11), and that Session 2 will skew more to the older tinkerers (suggested age range 12 to 17). Breaking it up into session topics like this will also help us manage the material resources better. And, as always, we will be interpreting each topic broadly.

New this year too will be the emphasis on “re-use” so we will be working (more…)

As much as I like the current logo (which I cobbled together in about five minutes last year when this site went live), it is problematic because:

1. - it doesn’t work well on a business card
2. - it doesn’t work well on a t-shirt
3. - the rendering is a little crude
4. - it’s not very “iconic” (weak branding possibilities)

My pal Ryan Tandy volunteered to tinker with a new version and I thought it might be interesting to track the development here.

Here’s the first version: