Middle School

Since a young age, one of my true passions has been in design. The following are a list of designs that I created in middle school from the ages of 6-13. Much to my regret, there are some missing pictures of these designs, as they got lost over the years.

• 1. 3^rd Grade - Airplane Drawing Club. In the third grade, I formed a club with my best friend Joe Backhaus. This was an exclusive club where it was only the two of us that would trade a small pouch full of markers, papers, and the previous night's work with each other. This lasted for about the whole year, and we would both design aircraft and the occasional tank on paper. These designs would of course be of the finest quality, ready for production on a military level. They can be seen in the following slide show:

1. 7^th Grade - Airplane Project. In the seventh grade, I was given the task of designing my own science project. I was ecstatic at this opportunity, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it - something with airplanes. At this time, I wanted to start flexing my skills with physically creating things, so I decided to make an airplane out of balsa wood and test out of three types of wings would work the best with a design like this. Sadly, I have lost pictures of this, as well as the original plane. I was able to salvage the report out of the old storage files.

2. To develop the fuselage, I whittled a solid balsa wood core down to a cylinder, and then removed a slot through the middle of it. Through this slot, I would be able to insert the wings at my discretion. I chose three different wing types to test, a wide delta wing, a narrower swept delta wing, and a straight rounded wing. These three wing types were determined from the book "Encyclopedia of Modern Warcraft". To develop my actual wing, I decided to figure out the average dimensions of these 3 wing types from the given specifications in the book and scale this down onto a wing that was suitable for my plane.

3. Once I developed the three wings, I began to work on the source of propulsion, which was a rubber-band propeller, which received energy via the stored potential energy of wound rubber bands. I was able to get all 3 wing types to successfully fly. I attempted to make a wind tunnel involving a box fan and enclosed Plexiglas, but ran out of funds (i.e. parents said no), and was only able to describe this in the report. Here is a photo of the final report:

1. 8^th Grade - Boat Project. In 8th grade, our class was again assigned the task of designing our own science project. To improve upon the airplane project from the previous year, I decided to apply my knowledge of balsa wood skills to the water. I also wanted to see the effects of designing an underwater "wing" or hydrofoil for a boat, and the effect that it would have upon boat performance. I developed three boats out of balsa wood, all of the same size with the same kind of propulsion used in the airplane project, of a wound rubber band propeller. Then, I added two different types of foils to the bottoms of 2 of the boats. I then timed the boats in my bathtub to see which one was the fastest, and to see if the hydrofoils actually worked. Here are some pictures of the boats:

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