Last week was Spring break at UND.  While many others were relaxing at home or on some sunny beach, there were some that aren’t that awesome and stayed back in Grand Forks.  I was one of them.

My Spring break was not a complete waste of time though.  I used this time to do some work around Beta.  Specifically, I concentrated on the Dining room floor, which was in desperate need of refinishing.  With the help of a couple of other Beta’s, we were easily able to accomplish our task.

Here are a couple of pictures of the floor before we started.  It’s pretty easy to tell where the most traffic is on the floor – right where everyone slides their chair.

The floor looks significantly better after it’s been sanded.

One coat of stain and three coats of polyurethane later and we have a finished product.

Since we were done with the floor earlier than expected, we decided to sand and repaint the radiator heater covers in the dining room.  Here are the covers sanded and primed.

Once dry, the heater covers are installed.  They look way better than before when they had been painted with a brush.

The dining room with all furniture returned.

You can view all of the pictures from the project on Beta’s website.

Friday was the last day of the spring semester at UND. With it comes the end to class and the beginning of summer fun. I know that I haven’t written any real content for my website in some time now, so I hope this post will get me back to writing more. In this post I cover some select projects from select Industrial Technology classes.

Industrial Technology Classes

IT 202

In January I had my first experience with 3D capabilities of AutoCAD. Although it may seem intimidating, 3D drawings in AutoCAD are very enjoyable. For my Midterm Project I was to draw a 3D model of a Prairie Style house. [More information on Prairie style houses and Frank Lloyd Wright cab be found here.] Some renderings of this project can be seen below.

After the completion of our Midterm project, we were immediately assigned the final project. We were required to design a 5 acre yard for our recently designed house. The yard was to contain some standard features, along with some of our own features. When the project was complete, I had exactly 39 hours, 40 minutes into it. (Total is Midterm and Final projects combined.) Although it didn’t turnout exactly as I had wanted it too, I am still happy with the final outcome.

IT 203

My other interesting class of the semester was IT 203, Manufacturing Processes. In this class we were shown the basic processes of manufacturing, using a lathe and mill. After watching the “boring videos”, learning equipment safety, and performing some simple operations, it was time to learn hands-on. Our only project for IT 203 was to manufacture all of the parts necessary to build a small scale steam engine. By completing this project, we were exposed to many operations in manufacturing.

Many different pieces of manufacturing equipment were used for this project including:

• Grizzly Mill
• Old Bridgeport Mill
• Cummings Lathe
• Clausing Lathe

Grizzly Mill

Cummings Lathe

Completed engine parts

Completed Engine Parts

Completed engine

Completed Engine

After the engine has been graded and returned to me, I will post some video of it running.

Other Industrial Technology Projects

During the past semester I received my first instruction in CNC equipment. The Manufacturing Lab at UND has a ShopBot CNC router similar to the one pictured below.

As simple introductory projects we designed and cutout wood signs. These wood signs contained a combination of 2D images and 3D text. The process is very simple: Draw sign in AutoCAD, import into ShopBot software, and generate the tool paths that the router will understand. Then sit back and watch your work be created for you.

Below are a couple of images of signs that I created.

AC/DC Wood Sign

Beta Theta Pi Wood Sign

Conclusion

Each of the above classes were simply introductory classes in each of their subject areas. As I am only a little ways into the Industiral Technology program at UND, I can expect several more projects with increasing levels of complexity to come in the future. I hope that you enjoyed reading this post and I hope to have more like it in the future.

Please let me know your thoughts on the projects or anything else in the comments.

As many of you may have heard in the news recently, the Red River Valley in North Dakota and Minnesota has been flooding for the past couple of weeks.  The cities of Fargo/Moorehead and Grand Forks/East Grand Forks have been experiencing 100 year flooding levels for the second time in 12 years.

Although television and radio have been the standard means of communication, the micro-blogging service Twitter has helped to keep citizens informed of the current flood levels and river situations.  These Twitter accounts, along with websites from the NOAA and webcams setup by local newspapers, have helped to keep the citizens of the Red River Valley informed with the most up-to-date information.

Below is the list of sites and Twitter accounts that I have found useful when following the Red River Flood conditions.

• Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Red River of the North at East Grand Forks
• Webcam view of Demers Ave. from Grand Forks Herald
  
• Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service: Red River of the North at Fargo
• @egffloodstage on Twitter.com
• @fargofloodstage on Twitter.com
• @RedRiverFlood on Twitter.com

Below are other links that I have not used, but may be useful to others.

• @jamestownflood on Twitter.com
• @oslofloodstage on Twitter.com

Have you used any of the above sites for monitoring the flood conitions?  What sites or services to you prefer?  Let me know by commenting below.

A link to some great pictures of the flooding along the Red River in North Dakota.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/red_river_flooding.html