Underground, Day 2, Week 3, SF
Tuesday is always such an exciting day here at day camp, because it's the first day in the week that we get to build all day long. So, these campers really get in the groove of their projects, which gives us so many opportunities to work on our Tinkering School goals.
The boring machine crew got right to work driving in screws on the hexagon.
Over on the track and train team, campers realized this morning that their design for train cars would make covering the floor extremely difficult. You see, they had planned for the train cars to be 5' square, and a few groups had already started decking them with 2x3s. Luckily, a collaborator intervened before they proceeded to cut our entire rack of 8' sticks down to 60"! We explained that a few things about our materials--mostly that we have a full bin of 4' long 2x3s, and all of our plywood backstock is precut to 4'x4', making their design tricky to accommodate and still have lumber left for the rest of the summer. It's only Tuesday, so today's the day to make any design changes if we need to!
Emily working hard on assembling a train car base. In the background. Oakley, Jake and Kalel work on another train car.
The train group ended up with a plan to quilt together scrap pieces of plywood to cover the floors of their train cars. Great work-around, and they look cool too!
The folks building the tunnel have created a design that will allow them to reproduce parts and add sections of tunnel quickly. So, I'm anticipating an enormous maze of tunnel that snakes all over the building by Friday--awesome! This approach also allows much of the team to work really independently, cutting and assembling parts, with some adult help to safely stand up sections as they go.
Nikki helps Isabel and Silas use a carpenter's square to clamp two pieces of wood together at a nice 90d corner.
Check it out! This tunnel is going to be so big! Emily, Calvin, Isabel, Owen, Nikki and Makarem are all helping to hold this section of tunnel stable while a brace is added to fix the distance between the two archways. Next, they'll stand it up!
The folks building the boring machine really have their work cut out for them! They have set out to build, basically, a giant wooden drill bit--wowee! Today, they started to try and figure out how to build the conical shape of the tip. Their hexagon base was a great start, and they started to tinker with how to attach the pieces of wood that extend out from the base. Compound miters would be one get all of these pieces to meet in mid air, but that doesn't solve the problem if building in an axle for the boring bit to spin around. We'll keep working on this tomorrow, stay tuned!
Cole, Kiran, Ella and Jack hard at work mounting some blocks that the cone pieces of the boring machine will mount to. One really elegant solution this team devised was to attach each piece that protrudes with just one screw at first so they could rotate the pieces into position in the desired cone shape.