Days One and Two - Life on a Farm

For the first time since I started Tinkering School in 2005, it started without me. They refreshed their skills on the Tinkering School tool bench.

Then something amazing happened in one of the nearby stalls.

Three baby goats were born.

Then Josh started the week for us with a question: how can a bowling ball get from the Ranch House to Barn One, powered only by gravity, twice in a row? He marked the spot on the barn porch where the bowling ball must arrive.

Which lead to some immediate design work. First on paper.

Then in prototype.

Which lead to refinement, and then construction started in earnest. By the time I went up to Barn One with the tinkerers, things were already in full swing.

Followed by a successful test of the first section of high-altitude, low-friction, bowling ball transport.

Then a lunch break that includes cards and baby goats.

The transport system works again at the installation site.

And the elevator system that will raise the ball up onto the barn porch begins to take shape.

In order to drive a huge lag bolt into the ground (anchor for the counterweight that will lift the ball onto the porch), Gil and Gabriel exhaust all possibilities in the toolbox and then end up re-shaping a smaller lag bolt to fit a socket onto an electric drill.

And we tested the aerial bowling ball transport track until the sun began to set behind the hills.

Because there is really nothing more beguiling than seeing a big blue bowling ball drift slowly overhead.