Building the Rig

We had spent a lot of time waiting before we had everything we needed to build our flight rig...we waited and waited.
Finally, all the parts to the rig arrived and we were able to begin working, with the dreaded T-slots. We learned pretty quickly that we were going to have to take apart our rig...over, and over and over, because every time something needed to be added to it or we needed to drill into a panel...we had to pretty much take half of the rig apart just to add or remove anything (FUN FUN FUN!!!).
This year's flight week was much earlier than the flight week we had last year. Which means that we were on a much tighter time frame. As spring break approached we knew we were going to have to spend some of spring break up at school. Joe and I stayed for the weekend over spring break. It was a lot of fun spending our spring break in the basement in the laser lab, were there are no windows. We got a lot of work done during this time and on Monday we were graced with the presence of Sam and Brad. It was nice to have more people working and to joke around with and talk about how everyone is going to be jealous of our spring break plans.


Spring Break Team picture in front of the rig


On Tuesday, Isa came, then the party really started. We finished up all our work packed everything up and headed to the UPS store to ship out our rig.
When we got to the UPS store the guy gave our team some sass. We told him we had been working on the experiment and it needs to be created. We also told him that since it was an experiment, that cost about $7,500 we wanted to get insurance and have 'Fragile' stickers and 'This side up' on it as well. He kind of ignored us and just said, 'oh well now I have to make a trip to the hardware store.' Basically he acted like we were really inconveniencing him and gave us attitude. We were a little worried.


Sam, Isa and Brad (on top of the rig) just before shipping it out