Springtime is a hectic time of year for Miner student design teams because every weekend at least one team is hustling to complete their projects, pack for a road trip, and persuade their professors to let them take exams early (or late). This year must have an imperfect alignment of the stars because FIVE (count 'em) teams are hitting the road to competition this weekend.
First out of the gate was Advanced Aero Vehicle Group's rocket squad, which has built a 10-foot tall monster with lots of aerial torque. This bird, named for Aiolos, the Greek god of the winds, has a target altitude of 5,280 feet to which it will carry an instrumentation package. They'll launch near Huntsville, Alabama at the NASA-sponsored University Student Launch Initiative. Next, while many of their parents were burning the midnight oil to get their tax returns done, the night of April 14th found many teams scrambling to finish up a few (or maybe many) last-minute details. The Human Powered Vehicle Team, which races in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon this year saw Ben Kettler and friends reinforcing a bottom bracket and threading new brake cables through the bike's frame.
The Steel Bridge Team was double checking bolt-hole locations, and grinding down rough welds and any other obstructions that could cause them to lose time when assembling their bridge. They have a nice-looking arch-style design where the arch supports are under the roadbed, different from most recent S&T designs.
They'll join the Concrete Canoe Team at an ASCE-sponsored regional conference already underway in nearby Carbondale, Illinois. Speaking of concrete boats and bridges, the float crew has recycled an old steel bridge team's structure as a rolling dry dock by adding wheels and padding so they can move their boat around without dropping it or breaking too much sweat. The new boat, christened Diversity has a wood-planked paint job that according to the team links the craft to a Civil-War era sailing ship of the same name. To embrace the somewhat off-balance atmosphere of the canoe races, Patrick Tilk has mounted a fully-operational swing-out BBQ grill to the boat's rolling carriage, giving the dry-dock display a certain aplomb. They aren't saying if they are trying to wrest the unofficial title of 'top party team' from the University of Arkansas, but that would be a challenge that even the Miners during St pat's week would have trouble with. Anyway, given the life-span of surprisingly delicate concrete boats, Diversity has seen little actual water time. The team spent some practice time at nearby Little Prairie Lake last week to get some serious paddling time in. The fact that the paddlers were facing each other was NOT a "failure to commun'cate", but merely Eddie Noonan training new paddlers in the finer points of keeping a keel-less boat in a straight line and turning a boat that has the handling characteristics of an oil tanker. Meanwhile, back on shore Pat was getting engineering data (bratwurst) from the BBQ grill prototype to ensure that the Miners could reduce their meal costs and add a little panache to their time in front of the judges.
Lastly, S&T's resurgent Baja Racing Team did some late-night assembly with Team Leader Casey Boyer finishing some welding on the car's transmission to complete the work. The next morning saw the car in a final noisy sprint on the future site of the infamous State Street wind tunnel. In this case the engine hadn't even cooled before it was shoved into a borrowed trailer (Thanks, C.I.E.S.!) for the trip to Auburn, Alabama where Casey reported they arrived safely late last night. We're sorry to report that there won't be an amphibious portion of the race this year. Three years of drought has left the ground so porous, they tell us, that it literally won't hold water.
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