TSO-D Day 3: Driving by Sunset

If you’ve ever driven a new car off the lot, you know what a brutal day-long event the purchase can be. The consolation, of course, is taking the keys from the salesperson and riding off into the sunset, full of sheer joy and happiness.

Junior Tinkerers, Jasper, Alex, and Chuck, work to secure wheels to their car.

Such is the joy and happiness of Tinkerers with one exception; they are building their dream cars for the Tour de Tinkering by themselves. Building rides from concept, Tinkerers collaborated to assemble car frames, steering columns, axles with wheels, brakes, seating and one ramp on Tuesday.

Collaboration is key, and this tool was used with as much precision and necessity as the Tinkerers use with a power tool.

Aahan, Hayden, and Nave discuss possible steering column construction methods.

“Guys, I need to check with the team on this,” Nave says to his teammates as they stand around their upside down car inspecting the underside of the vehicle. “What do you say if we don’t put plywood on this part?”

Nave’s teammates nod and verbally agree to the suggestion, ready to move on to the next task at hand.

Collaborator, Hayden, and junior Tinkerers, Annibeth, Aahan, and Nave, work on the underside of their team’s kart.

For the ramp building team, working together comes easily but so does the math needed to execute a downward slope that stretches 24’ in length with a 6’ high curved drop to the ground.

As they build the top of the ramp frame which is similar to the framed bottom of the ramp, Katherine says, “This one is longer. We just used the Pythagorean Theorem to find the length.”

Senior Tinkerer, Katherine, works on the top frame of her team’s ramp.

By day’s end, all teams had made serious progress on their vehicles, and several senior teams were able to test drive their new rides. Only these Tinkerers didn’t need a salesperson or keys to drive off the lot. They just needed a little push from their friends, the waning sun hanging over the horizon, and a cool summer breeze in their hair.

Collaborator, Jack, pushes senior Tinkerer, Ash, for a test run of their tricycle.

Check out the photo slideshow of our Tinkerers’ second day of collaborative project building.