EARTHQUAKE & Tinker for your life!

Our second week of Tinkering School started with a totally normal opening circle BUT THEN CRASH BOOM SLAM BAM SHATTER—an EARTHQUAKE struck! Luckily, we were all unharmed and kept our collective cool, which allowed us to get right to work, TINKERING FOR OUR LIVES!

Our session's theme is "Tinker for your life!" and every week we will be building, hacking, tinkering and making-it-working to survive this post-earthquake San Francisco. This blog will document the story of our work, and we'll upload even more photos to flickr for you to see the progress we're making.

Shelter plans complete with tunnels and multiple walls to protect from potential tsunami attacks.

Idea: make a big robot OR a shelter. Tough call...

We quickly realized we need to make plans for survival. Our collective priorities were 1) Shelter, 2) Water (filtration) and 3) Food. Once we had some ideas of what was needed we got right to work! 

Practicing knots for securing our tarp roof.

Being surrounded by so many random materials in the shop really helped find materials for our shelter-building. Tarps, wood for supports, rope for tying knots, and solar lights! 

Making supports for the roof materials.

Luckily the screw drivers we have use batteries and were not impacted by the loss of power. But when we needed to cut plexiglass for our water filter we realized the rest of the shop's saws and tools had no power. Oh, no! Then by a strike of genius we realized we could operate the band saw manually, using our hands to spin the inner saw wheel!

A likely first for Tinkering School: manually operating a band saw to cut plexiglass by solar lamp.

By the end of our first post-earthquake day we had a shelter (although we have many ideas on how to improve it) and progress on water filters. Group consensus thinks we'll survive the night but we certainly have more work to do... 

First night in the shelter... wish us luck!