We just finished staining our canoe. This year’s color: GOLD! Up next: cardinal lettering!
Gold!
Monthly Archives: March 2013
Design Team Prep for PSWC 2013 in Full Gear
As we approach the 2013 ASCE Pacific Southwest Conference (PSWC), our design teams are all working hard to complete their projects. Since USC is co-hosting PSCW this year, each team is taking extra care to produce an exceptional final product. PSWC events will take place on the USC campus on Thursday April 4th and Saturday April 6th, check out the full schedule here. If you’re at USC, you won’t want to miss the Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge Aesthetics Competition from 8am-5pm on Thursday at Alumni Park. Here’s an update on each design team’s progress.
Concrete Canoe
This year’s canoe is named “SC Traveler.” We’ve worked on the canoe for several hours every night this week, and it’s paid off. Despite some major time setbacks with mold removal, we’re ahead of schedule thanks to multiple tasks completed faster than expected, and we finished applying the stain and sealant today. Canoe races are on Friday, at the Santa Fe Dam.
The canoe aesthetics are also nearing completion. We plan to add our team name to the canoe in cardinal lettering tomorrow. We’ll also finish up our display board, which features an original, USC-themed design.
Environmental Team
The environmental design team worked on assembling their final water collection system last night. Their competition leads off the main PSWC design team events, occurring at Pardee Plaza from 8am-12pm. Our team looks solid and the competition should be exciting.
Steel Bridge
The steel bridge team is also putting in long hours and nearing completion. Once the bridge itself is done, the team will determine and practice the bridge assembly orchestration. As with canoe, the bridge team will create their display board and other finishing elements in the few days before competition as well. The 2013 PSWC Steel Bridge competition takes place on Saturday April 6th from 7am-4pm at Pardee Plaza at USC.
Other Miscellaneous PSWC News and Events
In other news, the concrete horseshoes and concrete bowling ball have been formed and are ready for competition. There are many other exciting events going on at PSWC, so you should check out the schedule for details.
Our USC ASCE E-Board is finalizing event coordination as well. Over 1,000 bottled waters and other snacks and beverages were wheeled through the design team area to the PSWC storage room today. Other E-Board members worked on finalizing the USC ASCE members’ PSWC event schedules. Overall, it’s shaping up to be an exciting conference and we’re all anxiously awaiting the competitions!
2013 Canoe Fresh Out of the Mold
We just finished removing the canoe from the mold. Well, really we removed the mold from the canoe, since our foam release agent didn’t work so the concrete adhered to the foam. But after a couple of days of chiseling, hot-wiring, sawing, prying, clawing, begging, pleading, hoping, praying, rolling-around-in-foam-on-the-floor, and yielding sheer manpower, we’re (basically) done! Now we just need to patch, sand, stain, beautify, etc…
What Happens When Foam-Release Agent Fails
Yeah, that happened. Lesson learned: test the setup small-scale before attempting on a 400-pound concrete canoe. Because in our case, the concrete ended up bonding to our foam mold, resulting in some headaches. (Video is 4-8x natural speed).
Concrete Bowling Ball Ready for Competition
Mold Removal Fun/Nightmare
Unfortunately, we ran into some snags with our mold removal process. The foam-release agent didn’t work, so the mold bonded to the concrete and it took three days to get it off… At least we didn’t have a male mold!
End of Mold Removal Day 1 
Begin Day 2 
Yes, we’re digging around under the canoe here 
#rollingaroundinfoamonthefloor 
Day Three 
Ready for the big move to elevate the canoe on the stands 
Removing the last chunks with a hot wire 
Cross-section Pour
We need to make a cross-section of our canoe showing the three layers of concrete and two layers of reinforcement for our canoe display, so we did a mini-pour-day. The one section took only about 90 minutes and just a few people; much more efficiently than pouring the actual canoe.
Meanwhile, the canoe’s almost ready to de-mold… 
Placing Concrete 
A low angle of the full canoe 
Another creative canoe angle 
Working on the second layer of the section 
Dry concrete elements await mixing 
We filled a few cylinders to strength-test our mix one last time 
Packing cylinders. We ended up with a sizable amount of extra mix. 
The finished cross-section.
Getting creative with our canoe materials
In order to work within our limited budget, we need to get creative with our materials. So instead of throwing out all of our scraps, we reuse them. This year, our bulkhead molds were built out of the cardboard boxes that our reinforcement shipped in. Our cross-section will be made with a section of last year’s canoe mold. We even re-used bulkhead trimmings to re-fill the holes that we popped in our air pockets in those bulkheads. By recycling our materials, we can maximize our small budget to efficiently build our canoe.
Why does our canoe need extra flotation via bulkheads?
Our canoe’s concrete mix is designed to be less dense than water, in order to ensure that it will float (although other factors also influence whether our canoe floats). This year’s mix is less dense than water, but only just. So as an added precaution, we add foam and air pockets (encased in concrete) to the canoe in the bulkheads (at the bow and stern). This way we have some added flotation factor just in case something goes wrong with our mix design!
Bulkhead & Patch Day 2013
The canoe wants bulkheads! 
First batch of mix 
Trimming bulkheads, and cleaning up 
Patching the top edge of the canoe 
Fitting, trimming, fitting, trimming… 
We started running into a lot of balloons in our trimming… 
Placing concrete patches 
Cleaning out the stray foam pieces 
Edges look good 
One bulkhead done! 
Erin: we’re going to need to take like six inches off the top.
Nick: okay, I’ll just go for it.
Both: uh, there go all of our air pockets…
Bulkhead/swiss cheese 
We had a couple leftover balloons to put inside popped balloon pockets 
Mixing another batch of concrete 
We ended up stuffing the balloon pockets with the foam we chopped off 
Still mixing… 
Patching done, ready for bulkheads! 
Bulkhead patching almost done 
I guess it could look worse… 
We still had to place the third layer of concrete on the ends under the bulkhead 
Wait, our bulkheads are both 6″ too long? … let’s chop them down more… 
Fitted bulkhead 
Packing in the bulkhead 
Placing this goes way faster than the rest of the canoe 
One down, one to go 
Starting bulkhead#2 
One more mix! 
Cleaning up 
Finished canoe 
bulkheads look good 
And the humidifying setup is reconstructed. DONE.