Table Made of Trash

This is a blog post on my recently completed science fair project. I was given 400 minutes (6 hours and 40 minutes) in all to finish the project. This time was spaced out over two weeks in 50 minute increments. The criteria was as follows: complete it in the time limit, spend no more than $25, and make something environmentally friendly and sustainable. This is an account of how I accomplished this, what I made, and what I learned along the way.

After some consideration, I decided to make a small coffee table out of other people's trash. I did not do this for the table itself, (Yes, making the table was necessary for me to accomplish what I hoped to do, but lots of other up-cycled things would do as well.) my real goal in making the table was to showcase how easy reusing things could be. In a very short amount of time I was able to make a working, decent looking, and (mostly) durable, coffee table. It actually wasn't designed as a coffee table, but just as a little table that could fit by your couch. Calling it a coffee table is just easier than saying, “ a little table that could fit by your couch”



My project



One of the most difficult parts of making the table was gluing the top onto the base. The tops of the large tins that serve as the main structure of the base are not flat, it is hard to get the glue to be strong with so little contact. Since there were no other adhesives I wanted to use on hand, I had to find a way to solve the glue problem. After some thought, I cut a piece of cardboard to size, and glued it onto the top on the tin. I then glued the top to both the cardboard and the edge of the tin. That worked pretty well.

If you were to try a project similar to this, I recommend that make a rough plan of your design after you get your materials but before you start building. That will likely make your process smoother and easier.

Through the process, I learned a lot about reuse, glue, and a bit about engineering. I think with my experience making this, I could do better if I tried a similar project in the future. If I had more time to work on this, my next step would be talking to others and getting them on board with reuse and up-cycling. In a way, I’m doing that with this blog.

Depending on how much you are able to find in your trash, and if you have glue on hand, this project might be free! That is one of the things that makes it so cool.

Garden Cork Board

Hi, we are Quincy and Juliana for our School Maker Faire project we have chosen to redesign our school garden board into a garden poster board where we took a roll of cork and attached it to the board so people can write on a post-it nice things and pin them up on the board. We decided to do this project because we thought that since there was an empty space in the garden, why not make it useful and fix it up.

One of the challenges was that we got cork board so you would be able to hang stuff on it, but the cork board wasn’t as thick as we thought so we had to push in the pin harder and it surprisingly fit but it’s still not very secure we will work on that better.

In this process we learned that you can’t guess measurements in science and there is always something wrong with the project, you have to measure everything and make sure it is all equal. If we had more time we would have made a sort of roof, for the board since the cork board isn’t waterproof and it’ll mold if it gets wet but we weren’t sure how to make it and we didn’t have enough time. I think if we had any advice we would say get more than one roll of the cork board so it would be able to go through the whole thing and be able to stick, also measure everything.

In our experience with the poster board, the structure of the board is very sturdy. We both paid very close attention to make sure the board had clarity, readability and especially the structure of it. We made sure the board didn’t look at all as the board before to make it clear that we redesigned it.

The cost of the whole project would be 15.00$. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qFCv03odS2FsTucVePr8M4Ih_nf7xCmhC1foa6IrXnQ/edit

Upcycled Fashion

The objective of our project was to reuse old clothes to make new “trendy” clothes. Our inspiration was seeing people throwing away perfectly good clothes when could just easily upcycle it, for example; when someone “throws away” a dress they could just make it into a top or/and a skirt.

One challenge we faced was not having clothes for the project. Since we didn’t want to spend money on the clothes because it would defeat the purpose of our project, we asked the people at our school if they had spare clothes they either don’t wear or don’t need anymore to bring it in, we also brought in some of our old clothes to upcycle.

In the process of our project we learned how to hand sew and how to manipulate the old clothes into new clothes. If we had more time, we would definitely upcycle more clothes and reach for bigger goals for the clothes we chose. If you do choose to do this project, make a plan for the things you’re going to upcycle, it’s better to see if you can improve on something before you start and mess it up and have no way of fixing it.

0$ spent on materials

3 hours spent on this project.

Tutorial video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnOdvk_1NBI

Avengers Infinity War Board Game: Infinity Board by Evan and Nora

Our project is a Avengers board game, our objective was to make a fun and cool board game for many ages. We were inspired by the move Avengers: Infinity War because we both really like it One challenge we faced was that it was really hard to make good circles but we overcame that when we got a protractor. We learned that you won't have much time and you want to give yourselves as much time as possible. If we had more time we would make our own pieces and not just use legos for the pieces. When doing Maker Faire, you should choose a project that is not very hard and save the hard projects for masterworks our maker faire project costs about $65.72 because of all the legos, other than that it costs nothing. Our outside resource was Avengers: Infinity War here is a link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154756/

Attempting to remake a scooter Calvin C. [Maker-ID 1]

Scooter

For a long time my scooter stayed broken. I decided that I wanted a new scooter after seeing a
scooter idea in a make magazine. My project is a Laser cut scooter. I will use my broken
scooter, plywood and the laser cutter in the Q lab. What I will do is take apart my scooter, and
replace all the parts but wheels with laser cut wood. A struggle I had was when we couldn’t
detach the handle from the board. I solved this problem by cutting it off.

I learned that I need to be better prepared for breaking apart the scooter and if I had more time I
would finish it. My advice is to do a test square before doing real cut if you are going to do
something like this in your future. The broken down scooter costed about 70$ but it was very
old and broken and my mom was gonna throw it away anyways.

Vegan Baking Project by Aleka V., Emmett P., and Joseph S. 6B

           In this project, we were supposed to find a problem, so we chose the problem of livestock. Livestock produces ½ of the greenhouse gases in the world, so one way to stop that is to go vegan. In our project, we looked at the difference in vegan baking and non-vegan baking to prove that even some of the most popular foods (baked goods are still delicious when made vegan. We made pancakes to show the people who came to our station that pancakes are still delicious without milk and eggs.
            At first, we were not sure what to bring to the maker faire. Maybe we should make a bunch of vegan cookies and hand them out? But that would be a lot of work. Then we thought that pancakes are delicious and easy to make quickly, the ingredients are in the budget, so why not make those. One problem that we encountered was when we found a pan that was too warped, so it would not get hot enough on the electric stove. This made the pancake batter stick to the pan, making it impossible. This resulted in a scrambled pancake. At first. We found out the problem and got another pan. Some advice for anyone who bakes vegan is you can’t overthink the recipe. If it looks like the dough for cookies is too dry, don’t try to make it wetter by adding more liquid. These people know their stuff, and adding more liquid might ruin the cookies.
            Our process was very simple. We were going to make individual baked goods at home, then bring them to school for everyone in the group to try and document the taste and texture. Also, we were working on perfecting a vegan pancake recipe for the Maker Faire. Once we had baked and eaten all the vegan and non-vegan muffins and cookies we wrote a couple of questions about vegan baking that people at the faire might have. We just straight up answered them. For example “What is a substitute for butter in baking?” Our answer was oil and nut butter. Within our project, we learned that making vegan baked goods isn't that hard. Our estimated price for all of our pancake ingredients was about $10, because of the flour, sugar, and soy milk which we bought. This is a site with our favorite vegan recipes. If we had enough time to do more we would’ve made regular pancakes at Maker Fair and we might have brought a lot of vegan and non-vegan cookies and lemon poppyseed muffins, also we would’ve more baked goods at home.

Liquid Sand Bin - Zorian and Mason's Maker Faire Project

The Liquid Sand Bin

Zorian and Mason

5/20/19

For our Maker Faire, we decided to do a Mark Rober inspired liquid sand bin. A liquid sand bin would be a small bin/box with PVC pipes wired below the sand in the box to blow air through it, making it liquidy. Early Sunday morning we got to work. First, we used a bandsaw to cut a bunch of pieces of PVC to length, then got caps for them. Next, we fit the pieces together in a small bin to make sure they fit well. Next, we used a drill press to drill two sixteenth inch holes 90 degrees apart from each other, and again and again down the pipe two and a half millimeters apart from each other. After that, we went to home depot for some parts including Teflon tape, new PVC glue, and valves for the big compressor we had. We went back to our house and started gluing all the PVC together, and drilled the holes in the plastic box to fit the PVC through. After a few more mistakes and cuts on my dad’s band saw, we were ready to glue the last pieces into place. After that, we plugged in the air compressor and hooked it up to the contraption. Then we realized we had a problem. Even when we turned up the air compressor to full capacity, it only gave us about 10 seconds of good run time. We did some troubleshooting and realized a lot of people used big compressed Nitrogen or CO2 tanks. We weren't sure where to get a tank of Nitrogen, so we went to Atlas Welding, and rented a tank, but had no regulator. Instead of a nitrogen regulator, we used an argon regulator, which is the main reason why the gas didn’t work well, so we mostly ended up using the air compressor, but the gas was fine too. Here is a short clip of when we turned up the air super high. If we had some more money and time, we could make an entire hot tub of “liquid sand”, using a much larger air compressor. I think we learned a lot about all of the machines and tools we used, and we will definitely remember next time to be careful when we are gluing, and to anyone else out there who might want to do this project, you really don’t have to follow exactly what Mark Rober did, as we did not follow many of his instructions. We totaled up all the costs and we got $26. This included storage boxes, 50 lbs of sand, lots of PVC pipe, PVC glue, and some valves and valve adapters, as well as the $10 for the compressed nitrogen. all the pipes we just borrowed and gave back.