What has happened thus far...

Since we are starting this almost 2 months after our meetings started this is going to be kinda a long post to get everybody up to speed.

The two team co-captains this year (Will Hunnicutt and myself) have 4 years concrete canoe experience between them and are thrilled to be seeing along the 2009-2010 team. Our team started out the year with several new ideas that we wanted to start on right away. Some of the top ones are: fiberglass mold instead of Styrofoam, new application method (shotcrete gun), new recycled aggregate ideas, and overall better documentation of the year (hence this page!).

The first few meetings were spent getting to know new team members and going over what we want to do differently this year. A crude list was constructed:

From this list we jumped right in. The first couple of meetings at the lab we started experimenting with the epoxy and decided to construct a trial mold out of pieces of last years metal skeleton.

From here we laid down the fiberglass reinforcement and experimented with different support techniques (cardboard vs. no cardboard). The cardboard option was definitely the way to go.

This new technique will replace our old method of fitting styrofoam sheets between the metal cross sections and cutting them down to size. This is going to be a HUGE timesaver. We finished up the trial mold with plaster, latex paint, releasing agent, and some plastic tubing spacers.

While this is going we were also thinking of new ideas for our second type of recycled aggregate. We basically had two options. Either purchase expensive ceramic beads that were a little heavier than we liked, or crush one of our old canoes. We chose the crushing. Cost effective, lighter, more fun. here are some pictures and videos of the process the canoe went through.

Now for the smashing....

Like butter.....

Into the crusher!!!!

That final material is going to be sieved into the sizes we need in an upcoming meeting.

Now! For our most exciting project so far, the shotcrete gun! The shotcrete gun idea isn't a new one, we just finally have a team ready to tackle it. Our shotcrete gun was solely based off of a few pictures of what one should look like. So naturally there were quite a few trial and error situations to try to get this thing operational. Most of the gun was built over the summer by Will, Kevin, and Debbie? (musta been a boring summer..) but the hose connections weren't assembled properly until mid October. On October 7th we had a dry run with water instead of concrete (wet run?).

Yayy! It works! After adding a few modifications (chin strap) this baby was ready for concrete action. On October 21st we had our first concrete trial. This is where we are at now. After filling with concrete (thanks to the funnel) we decided to run our first spray on the side of Spangler (it needed it, believe me). Lesson learned from first trial, secure chin strap before spraying! Here are some videos of the shotcrete gun in action.

filling the gun:

Spangler repair work:

Spraying test mold:

and finally, Kevin fixing some trouble spots on the spangler driveway