I'm just coming to the end of my holidays now. For the last few weeks before the break we were flat out designing and building bridges as a part of a structural engineering design paper I'm taking. It was made pretty clear early on that our design- a 'lenticular truss'- was going to be a bit tricky to do accurate calc's for. We were only allowed to use thin MDF gussets (100 x 100 x 3mm) and MDF strips (25 x 9 x 2400mm), and a bloody liberal amount of PVA glue too. We sussed it all out anyway, and built this:
Which soon became this:
... A pretty good result! They had a scoring equation for which you earned the maximum points if your bridge failed when the third guy got to the middle (due to max moment, rather than a shearing failure at either end). They added some points if it failed where you thought it would and if it was a tensile failure, or something. Completely missed out on those.
The weekend before the testing I managed to get out for a fish! (finally). We put the call out on the FishSoc facebook page and got a carload of us going out to lake Coleridge. The crew was myself, Beky, Ben, Bosley, and Berry. It was a ripper day, with a dusting of snow on some of the higher surrounding mountains-the fresh melt water from them didn't do anything good to the lake temperature; wading in the swanny and stubbies definitely highlighted the value in neoprene waders.
We walked in from where the metal road turned into a boggy 4WD track (the poor corolla was battling) and initially fished a drop off where a small tributary joined the lake. After an hour or two Pondy had some luck fishing the eddies out deep and ended his trout-drought with a very nice 5lb rainbow.
The weekend before the testing I managed to get out for a fish! (finally). We put the call out on the FishSoc facebook page and got a carload of us going out to lake Coleridge. The crew was myself, Beky, Ben, Bosley, and Berry. It was a ripper day, with a dusting of snow on some of the higher surrounding mountains-the fresh melt water from them didn't do anything good to the lake temperature; wading in the swanny and stubbies definitely highlighted the value in neoprene waders.
We walked in from where the metal road turned into a boggy 4WD track (the poor corolla was battling) and initially fished a drop off where a small tributary joined the lake. After an hour or two Pondy had some luck fishing the eddies out deep and ended his trout-drought with a very nice 5lb rainbow.
 |
| Looking back up towards the tributary |
Having exhausted our luck in that spot, we moved on down to the western end of the lake where a much larger river flows into the lake, hoping to find a strong spawning spot. We had no luck here and quickly retired back to Becky's camp site for a hot cup of tea.
During my last week of holidays I've been back up to Hamilton which was awesome- great to the the olds again! And this weekend just been I cruised down to Napier for Pondy's 21st which was mint. No doubt there will be more incriminating photos surfacing in the next wee while.
Hoping to tee up an excursion this week to make the most of my freedom! Back into it next week.
That's all for now!
During my last week of holidays I've been back up to Hamilton which was awesome- great to the the olds again! And this weekend just been I cruised down to Napier for Pondy's 21st which was mint. No doubt there will be more incriminating photos surfacing in the next wee while.
Hoping to tee up an excursion this week to make the most of my freedom! Back into it next week.
That's all for now!
