Niskayuna High School seniors show off engineering projects
A Niskayuna High School senior might have created the next great invention, as four ideas are shown off to community members.
The high school’s engineering design and development class held their final presentations on Tuesday, June 14, with working projects in hand. Students worked together to come up with an idea on what they wanted to create to solve a certain problem. Often times parts or items needed for the project where donated by a company and some students meet with professionals to help tackle their project.
The largest project visually was the electrically power assisted toolbox cart, which held tools used for racecars. Tim Hartman and James Cutter placed a tool cabinet on a frame with rugged wheels.
I drive racecars and we wanted a way to make it easier to get tools and parts from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ at the racetrack, said Hartman. `Sometimes you can be traveling some pretty good distances with some pretty good weight.`
Hartman said he races most often at Lebanon Valley Speedway and Cutter is a mechanic on his crew. Hartman said racing runs in his blood, because his grandfather raced in the late 50’s and then his father started to race in the 80’s.
`I inherited the love of racing,` he said.
Due to donations, he said him and his partner only had to put $30 toward the possibly expensive project.
`We got down to crunch time and realized we had a lot to do in a short amount of time,` said Hartman. `We were just kind of learning as we went and finding out some new stuff as we went.`
If something didn’t work, he said, they would have to try and figure out a way amongst themselves to make it work. Now that the project is completed it won’t be sitting on the basement of a house.
`We are going to keep it intact and fill it full of tools and bring it to the racetrack with us,` he said.
Another pair had their invention follow their passion too, which happened to be lacrosse.
Brendan Montrello and Nick Massaroni both play lacrosse at school and decided the balls used didn’t need to be thrown out when they could be refurbished.
Though refurbished balls can’t be used in games since it has been changed, the rubber balls could be reused for practice.
A sandblaster is used to resurface balls that have had their exterior diminish over time and become too slippery. The ball is secured firmly and is continuously spun as the sand blaster moves about 180 degrees to fully refurbish the surface.
`Hopefully when we go on and really start thinking about this, maybe after college, we want to get four balls at a time,` said Massaroni.
Every month the school needs to buy a new case of lacrosse balls, totaling 200 per case, said Montrello. After one season the schools would save the money of the initial investment to build the machine, said Massaroni, but a school might already have a sandblaster that would reduce the initial investment greatly.
Following the sports theme, Eric Eoff presented interchangeable spike plates for shoes used in track and field.
`The top of your shoes don’t wear out as quickly as the bottoms, so when these get dull you have to buy a new set of $80 shoes and that is a pain,` said Eoff.
He took a fiberglass mold of a shoe and then used computer software to design the spike plate, which fixes to the exact contour of the bottom of the shoe. Very strong Velcro then holds the spike plate to the shoe.
`The constant pressure down keeps (the spike plate) on,` he said.
He tested the shoe in wet conditions too and the adhesive didn’t loosen. He even ran up and down the stairs at the school to test the product and it didn’t fail. The product could be sold around $8.
If you couldn’t find your keys or wallet before heading out the track practice, John Mack and John Fragnoli invented a small device, which would be placed onto any object.
To find an item with the device, you would push a button and using an FM radio frequency a noise would be emitted from object. Each small device would be tuned to a certain FM frequency to allow for the sound to work.
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