UW-Madison bridge, canoe teams sweep regional competition
 vercoming such obstacles as thunderstorms, muddy
turf and an emergency hotel-hallway bridge-building practice, the UW-Madison
Concrete
Canoe Team and Steel
Bridge Team each dominated the Great Lakes Regional Competition,
held April 26 through 29 at Purdue University.The Concrete Canoe Team
scored a perfect 100 points, finishing first in each of five races and
drawing top scores on its technical paper, presentation and final product
judging.
“Everything went as well as we could’ve
hoped,” says team co-chair Austin Kazda.
“Improvements in inlay techniques, as well as a new overlay technique,
helped improve the aesthetics. Our paddler training was a success as
we finished first in all of the races.”
On Friday of the competition, the canoe races took
place on Hadley Lake, a body of water that receives excess water from
the Celery Bog via tile drains in the Cuppy-McClure Ditch system. “Participants
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign informed us that
a month earlier, the area that we were standing in was under a couple
of feet of water,” he says. “That, mixed with the thunderstorms
the night before, made the ground very soft. We were walking around
in a few inches of mud all day.”
Four-time national champions, the group again advances
to the national competition. Held June 14 through 16 at the University
of Washington in Seattle, the event will draw more than 20 of the best
concrete canoe teams in the country. To prepare, UW-Madison team members
will continue to edit their technical paper, rehearse their presentation
and practice their racing technique. “From what we can tell it
is going to be a well organized and fun weekend,” says Kazda.
“We’re looking forward to it.”
The Steel Bridge Team capitalized on the long hours
of preparation members devoted to designing, fabricating and practicing
for competition. “Enough cannot be said about our construction
team and the selfless effort they give every time they come to practice,”
says team co-chair Bill Schmitz. The team
earned top scores in construction speed (besting runner-up University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by a full six minutes), construction
efficiency, structural efficiency, lightness and aesthetics, and a second-place
score in the stiffness, or aggregate deflection, category.
On paper, the team won handily. However, during its
practice runs—held inside the Purdue ROTC firing range building—the
students weren’t so sure about their chances, says Schmitz. “We
had problems with grit getting into our connections,” he says.
The group tried twice to construct its bridge, with
no luck. “We had to stop, sand and file pieces—and then
refit them to ensure everything worked,” he says. “After
the problems on the second practice run, we stopped practicing and decided
to set up the bridge in our hotel room to ensure that all members connected
smoothly.”
But the bridge was too big for the room. “We
had to tell the hotel staff that we had an emergency so that we could
use a hallway to set up the bridge,” says Schmitz. “Luckily,
all pieces but one fit together smoothly and the last one only needed
light sanding to get together. We took the bridge apart and packed it
in the boxes knowing that the construction team was still worried. The
next morning, we worried mightily about grit in connections, so we did
not set the trusses on the floor until the very last moment before our
timed construction run. As it turned out, the team’s worry turned
to joy as the construction team churned out their fastest time of the
year.”
The team went on to earn third place in the national
competition May 25 and 26 at the University of California at Northridge.
UW-Madison students also placed in the Concrete
Frisbee competition, and a technical presentation by student Jerry
Wilke received second place. In addition, the UW-Madison group
also won the competition sportsmanship award. “This was a real
tribute to how the team conducted themselves, given that they won so
many of the events,” says Professor
Steve Cramer, who advises the teams.
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