This week was pretty scattered and a little bit of everything. After being physically and mentally drained from the crazy arches week, we continued our preparation for the construction of our sign. Monday we headed out to the site and quickly realized that using utility poles for suspending our cables just wouldn’t work. The vegetation had grown up too high and there just wasn’t any easy way of setting the poles in the area with our given time restraints. We then looked back to the idea of attaching our cables to two large trees on both sides of the road, forcing us to redesign our pole connections. We then contacted Joe Farruggia, our trusty Rural Studio friendly engineer. We told him all about the issues we were having and he was very helpful in our design alterations. Also in preparation for the sign, we went back to our sign mock-up and sadly had to “mock-down.” We needed to salvage all the parts so we could reuse all the turnbuckles and U-bolts in the actual sign. At the end of the day we had accomplished a ton but we were still far from completing our work at Perry Lakes Park.

Tuesday we once again headed out to Perry Lakes. We began cutting down the existing gate located on site. We took measurements of terrain differences between our two trees and also gathered information on tree diameter. The trees turned out to be wider than we thought (roughly 2′ 6″) and we quickly realized we once again had to redesign our tree connections. Some of us finished up at Perry Lakes around noon and headed back to research our connections. We also gathered more supplies for the sign by ordering parts, making phone calls, and taking inventory of our materials.

learning objective D_develop skills in using materials and tools. The bandsaw was absolutely useless because it couldn’t cut through these hollow steel poles unless you had 2 hours to spare to cut one pole…..but hey, at least we know how to use it.

Since we spent the entire previous week with the arches, we had a make up day on Wednesday for Dick’s classes. We spent the morning doing the usual chapter review and test, but we spent the remainder of the day designing and gathering supplies for our final materials and methods project: a joggling board (see picture below). Since, after all, we are the Rural Studio, we were thinking of new and creative ways to build the traditional Charleston rocking bench. We finally decided to utilize the excess roundwood (from one of the thesis teams) for our rockers and legs and use and old baseball dugout bench for the seat. We will be spending time next week building the joggling board. It will be finished by Pig Roast next weekend!

On Friday we had to refocus ourselves on the Perry Lakes entrance sign. Instead of heading out to the site, we searched for the new materials we needed to secure a cable to 2 ½ foot-thick trees. We spent the morning in a panic because we could not locate an essential piece to our cable connection. We couldn’t even find one in the entire United States! After a few headaches and punches thrown, we realized that a simple design alteration (yet again) would work perfectly for our application. John and Matt then headed to Demopolis to return some materials we no longer needed from Alabama Power and unexpectedly received more materials from the generous company. Brett and Corey spent the rest of the day running to nearby stores and ordering final materials for next Monday. Then, we ran into another huge problem. Nobody in the area, and we called about 20 distributors, has galvanized threaded rod in stock and the soonest we could get it would be next Wednesday (because of a rural shipping complication). After another genius revelation, we decided to have the rod shipped to Dick’s house in Selma and we will pick it up on Sunday. Overall, the day was hectic and full of unexpected obstacles, but as always, we came out on top and we will have all of the materials ready to build the sign on Monday.

learning objective B_develop problem solving skills. After running into several problems finding the right materials on Friday, we learned to work together in order to get through our dilemmas.