Hello everyone,

Jake and I have decided to take our project in a different direction over the past couple of weeks. We believe that attaching the skates of the sled to our frame is currently of greater importance than creating the seat, so that will now be secondary to finishing the frame with the skates. We are close to accomplishing this task, and all we have left to do is glue the frame together with an industrial strength adhesive, JB Weld.

Eric and Jake

Recently, Jake and I, in an attempt to begin the construction of our seat, created our first batch of clay. It turned out to be very malleable and it held the shape of our hands very well. It felt a lot like silly putty and now we're on to making more.

Jake and I have ordered everything to create our sled. We decided to use corn starch clay to make a mold of one of our posteriors and then smooth out the indentation to make the seat have a more general fit, allowing other people to use it comfortably. Our mold will be made out of corn starch, baking soda, and water. Once we have our mold we are then planning on filling it with instant dry plaster, which will create a more durable mold that we will be able to vacuum form around. Once this is accomplished we'll have our functioning seat!

Hey everyone! We have recently updated every page on the blog to keep you all up to date with the work we have been doing. We recently had our first round of presentations for our project, where we presented the first semi functional sled frame. Next we need to make final adjustments to the frame and create a seat for our sled.

Hey everyone. So recently we have completed our frame and we are now tackling the next step in our design process, the seat. We are currently thinking of either using baking soda imprint clay to take the form of Jake's posterior or scanning his behind to and using a printed model to vacuum form off of.

Unfortunately, after reviewing our newly completed pieces, we have encountered a few setbacks. We are working to correct some minor mistakes in our custom joints, and we have already re-bent some of our PVC pipe to make sure everything fits. We're on our way to our next model!

We have just completed all of the pieces of our frame! We are currently printing custom made joints which we made through CAD modeling. We're gonna see how everything fits together and adjust our plans on moving forward based on any improvements that need to be made.

The first piece of our sled is finally completed! We have finished a section of the nosepiece of our sled. To complete this we filled PVC pipe with sand, built a jig at the correct angle and shape for our nosepiece, used a heat gun on the pipe to make it more flexible, and then bent the pipe around our jig. It worked extremely well, and we are now on our way to building our sled. 

This is our nosepiece and the jig it was built around. Next up, we have to connect this to other pieces of pipe, and build off of this frame. Jake and I can't wait!