A Tribute to Ivan
My fascination with engineering came as a high school freshman, studying aircraft and how their designs were optimized for their mission. I was just an idealistic JROTC cadet at the time; I was not yet prepared for the mathematical and physics odysseys that awaited me.
It was high school chemistry that first introduced me to the marriage of science and mathematics; I totally understood the integration by junior level Physics I. My view of science, favoring the quantifiable over the qualifiable, could not have been possible without the efforts of one remarkable man: Ivan "The Terrible" Kimble.
Mr. Kimble was a very unique individual. He was a big man who could be temperamental at times but generally came off as gentle as a teddy bear. He was quite smart, and his lectures generally helped students to completely understand and work problems dealing with physical phenomena. He let his students get away with murder. Most importantly, he saw the value of hands-on experimentation to verify what was learned from the text book.
By the time senior year rolled on and the potential engineers were enrolled in his "Advanced Physics" course (it wasn't called "AP Physics" because Ivan had no desire to teach AP, although he did come in early to work with students who wanted to take the AP tests.) We learned all of the basic concepts that would be covered in Embry-Riddle physics courses (up until the midway point of Physics III.) We even used the same textbook, College Physics, that Embry-Riddle pilots use for their PS 103 physics course. But the most important aspect was his treatment of "lazy seniors." He fed our laziness between chapter tests by not enforcing homework deadlines, encouraging independent reading, and allowing us to choose which homework problems to do on anindividual basis. The only contradiction to this was the quarterly projects.
Over the two years of Kimble, we had some pretty fun projects. There were the rockets, with both compressed water and solid propellant. There were mouse trap cars that refused to work (in my case anyway.) We had baking soda submarines (dubbed "Ghetto Rides" by Jillian, who would be given the facetious title of "Miss Physics" by Kimble.) And then there was the catapult.
The catapult was only one half of our fourth quarter project during senior year, the other half being the solar car that I forced my father to build for me. (During our in-class testing for the car, I attempted to build a helicopter by airfoiling a set of tongue depressors and attaching them to the electric motor. The fumes of molten elctric motor taught me that I had exceeded the torque rating for the motor.) Kimble's requirement was for this catapult to fling a water balloon for a given distance (in the vicinity of ten meters.) No elastic could be used. The catapult had to fling balloons at other members of the class, who were standing in the target area. To sweeten the deal, Mr. Kimble wore a white shirt on the day of the demonstration.
We had no clue about calculations or such when designing the catapult. We just did a few sketches on scrap paper nd talked over a few design considerations. We wanted a long moment arm, because that would allow us to accelerate the water balloon to a faster velocity. The launch angl should be greater than 45 degrees, probably closer to sixty. And we needed to use heavy weights to accelerate the projectile. In order to lift these weights, we added our favorite muscle man to the team: "Big C" Konfirst.
The assembly began at Davis's house. He and Jeffery had already started, but it appeared that we had gotten to a poor start from a materials standpoint. We had no lumber long enough to frm the arm for the catapult, so we used a long piece of PVC piping instead. In hindsight, the tubing was not a stable launch platform, and the moment of inertia for the pipe was probably too large. The pipe also lacked the additional mass that the lumber would have provided.
From the outset, we were working with a sub-standard set of tools (or at least what I considered sub-standard. When I assisted Jeffery in the construction of his impervious loft, I learned that my father's tool collection is superior to that of most households.) The circular saw, not used in many years and outfitted with a blade too thin for the task, simply sat in place when we tried to cut the wood for the catapult's frame. It made a lot of smoke, some of which had that sweet pine smell I love so much. It took too much force to move the blade. We had no circle cutter to bore holes for our pivot. Jeffery's idea was to use the drill in drilling out all of the material within the region we wished to void. Using common sense, I suggested simply drilling around the circle's circumference until the inner circle fell out Essentially, we used the drill to saw through wood. Miraculously, the drill bit didn't shear off.
Such was not the case for Mr. Davis's poor jigsaw. I think we broke two saw blades on that fateful Saturday in May 2001. We nearly ran into disaster when the saw's cord got in the blade's path. I had to yell at Jeffery to get him to halt saing before he penetrated the cord's sheath (he came pretty frick9ing close.)
We ran into the dilemma of finding a fixture to hold the projectile. There were many old playthings in the Davis household garage, but no buckets of a suitable size. After some soul searching, we headed out to Ace Hardware in search of screws. We also stopped at the nearby Seven-Eleven so Davis could gas up his car. We stopped inside for Slurpees, because there's never a wrong time to be drinking a Slurpee. As I finished my Slurpee back at the Davis residence, we realized that my Slurpee lid was the perfect shape to hold the balloon. We fastened it to the pipe with good old American duct tape. That was not such a good idea in the long run, because the attachment to the rounded pipe wasn't too stable, and the balloon had a tendency to overturn the lid and fall off.
The catapult was tested using children's playground balls and stuffed animals. After falling short in a few trials, we made use of Konfirst's weights and got those animals hurled like Charles Barkley tossing a bum through a plane of glass at a tavern. Now it was time to decorate the contraption. Davis added an NES controller and fastened a spinner from everyone's favorite homoerotic board game, Twister. Our last problem was that of transportation. The darned thing was too big to ever fit in the backseat of anyone's car (It was over 4' high with a 6' arm.) The decision was made to partially disassemble it. (A year later, I would find myself doing the same thing to get Jeffery's "menage a neuf" loft into the back of his Ford Explorer."
When we finally got it to school, the catapult was a colossal disappointment. It couldn't even go the distance that Kimble had mandated. We allowed it to sit outside in the rain, and it probably ended up in the dumpster.
Still, the catapult was a successful failure. Most importantly, we had a lot of zany fun building it, cracking jokes, destroying Mr. Davis's power tools, and flinging stuffed animals. It also showed us the importance of thorough and realistic planning and testing.
Ultmately, all of Ivan's projects made me decide that engineering was for me. I got to see a contraption through from idea to design to construction to operation. Of my graduating class, not too many chose careers in engineering. The T-Dog settled for mechanical engineering, Davis and Yan man adopted computer engineering. Jeffery selected Nuclear engineering but changed after a semester, while Findlay and I went into aerospace engineering. I, like Jeffery, became disillusioned with the discipline when all of my initial courses were exercises in number crunching. But I was saved by Dr. Frank J. Radosta, who taught me all about aircraft structures and re-introduced me into the magically simplistic world of design that is part of the Aircraft Structures I course. I still feel like modern engineering programs focus too heavily on design and theory and don't place an emphasis on what G. Harry Stine, in his book Single Stage to Anywhere, called "cutting metal and blowing stuff up." But that doesn't mean I won't be cutting metal and blowing stuff up--what started with Kimble and continues with Riddle will manifest itself as cut metal and blown up hardware.