It is day 12 here at Tinkering School, and we can all officially say that these projects are really starting to come together. Every tinkerer has contributed an amazing amount of mind power, hard thinking, problem solving, and heavy lifting. We have been explaining to some of the burnt out kiddos that using these powerful tools, and lifting all of this heavy wood, and solving problems all day long.

Let's check out their projects!

The hydropower team has successfully completed a water hammer built out of foraged materials and held together by lashing, a plumbed testing pool including a water pump and filter, and a waterwheel, powered by the water hammer that spins a motor that power an LED light. Wow. And they are most certainly feeling the exhaustion effects of working that hard.

Frannie and Isabella building the waterwheel for the hydropower team.

Frannie heads off to the tablesaw to cut new pieces for the waterwheel.

The potential energy team has successfully built a cart that can roll under it's own power/passenger, rolls smoothly with it's custom skateboard wheel bearings, and drives in a very straight line! This team's main challenge is with their new propulsion system. Unlike the old version where a weight is dropped to pull the rope/driveshaft attached to the axle, the driveshaft is connected to the seat, which when weight is added, the seat drops down two bearing'd shafts to propel the car forward. Crazy right?

Michaela, Madelyn, and Morgan assemble the right propulsion bearing.

The windmill team spent their day undoing some of the construction they had done yesterday that had broken over night, and redoing the construction so that it would be lighter, yet more rugged. This included taking off the wooden windmill blades, and remaking them out of cloth.

Carles, Onion, Gus, Diego, Liora, and Matthew fasten the cloth to the blade shafts.

Some of the side projects of the day to give our minds a rest included building suspension for a cart...

...building a sailboat...

...dance offs...

...and cart riding...

To sum it all up, today was awesome. And as we come down to our final day (and final blog post sad sad sad), the work is crazy, but we are still going. Stay tuned for our FINAL FULL BUILD DAY tomorrow. Goodnight!

Session E - Day 12 - The Exhaustion Is Real