Welcome To The County Fair - Day 3 - Week 2 (Mark Day School)
A full day of building…and cupcakes! One of our tinkerers was inspired to go above and beyond and make some (truly) amazing s’more cupcakes to share with everyone this week. What a treat!
Besides cupcakes, today was about problem solving. Our spinning ride must be able to be taken apart and re-assembled in the courtyard, so the team had to figure out how to make it easily re-assembled.
Final details like seats can be surprisingly hard to engineer, but we had a dedicated team working on that problem as well, and they’ve made good progress.
We took a moment for a skit about sharing drills (they are a popular tool!) and for a workshop on structural reinforcement of wood. We learned that a corner with a triangular brace can withstand much more pressure than a corner without one.
The roller-coaster is progressing slowly, but not due to the efforts of those working on it. The ambitious ride has a car and a long section of track, but each element has taken a lot of time so far, and there’s still a lot of ramp to build! We’ll cheer them on tomorrow and hope a few more tinkerers will join the effort to bring the coaster to life by Friday!
How high should the “bump” be and how will we support its weight?
Our tinkerers get very adept at driving screws in tight quarters. It’s not as easy to use a drill sideways but we get lots of practice during the week.
We learned to use assembly squares to clamp our wood at right angles.
Cutting rollercoaster rails on the chop saw
Which is sharper, the jigsaw or Jayson’s mohawk? This is one of many demos that collaborators do so that tinkerers can see how to properly use tools for various purposes.
Click through the gallery below for more photos from today. To see many more photos from throughout the week, visit our Flickr page.
