We held our 2008 Maine Camp at Bonnie Eagle High School, in the town of Standish.
Our host was Don Denico who is an Industrial technology teacher there, as well as a VERY accomplished cook .
We had a good turnout, not only from Shopbotters in the area, but also from a few of the surrounding states. We also had our first high school student “Campers”as four of Don’s technology students actually came in to school on a Saturday to learn more about the Shopbot !
Don is fortunate to have a very diverse curriculum, including modules where the students start out by learning Autocad, and wind up using Artcam Pro to generate cutting files for the Shopbot.
He is also fortunate to have the support of his administration to the point that they outfitted his wood shop with a Shopbot, Artcam software, and the state of the art “Saw Stop”table saw ( more commonly known as the “hot dog saw”). He showed us the safety features of that machine, and it WAS pretty impressive. And somehow between his talks, and keeping things together, he snuck off into the school kitchen to cook us the lasagna lunch you see pictured above….
Jim Frost came in from Minnesota and did a good talk on using state supplied maps to cut “underwater topo” maps of local lakes. Anyone attending a Camp has seen pix of Jim’s work…
Bill Thorpe walked us through the steps of properly grounding a Shopbot and control box, and he also did a lot of the background work in organizing this Camp.
Terry Kovacs brought in some great Show and Tell items, particularly some very thin walled, double sided, dishes he cut on his machine.
As a group we covered most of the “universal”topics such as vacuum tables, carving 3D, software, and mold making. In this Camp we also included a session on how Shopbotters are using their machines in the boat building trades as well.
It was a good Camp, and I enjoyed speaking with the high school students about their “take”on the CNC process. It’s really refreshing to hear 16/17 year old kids brainstorming business ideas to fund their college educations with a Shopbot…..
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