2009 Minnesota Camp

The 2009 Minnesota Camp was held at Glen Kadelbach’s ( www.innovativefoam.com) 80 acre organic farm/shop complex, in Hutchinson, MN.
Glen’s specialty is building with foam, and he had a large number of pieces on hand to show us.
In addition to foam signs, and displays, he also ran us through some of his wide ranging line of products which included everything from “faux” foam wrought iron, to cardboard furniture! In fact Glen has incorporated the Shopbot into just about every facet of work on the farm there including the creation of his own ‘Bot built chicken plucker (above) which is probably the only one of it’s kind to date…(note: NO chickens were harmed in the running of this Camp…).Every time we saw something new he was kind enough to explain the process behind it’s creation. And he also ran his industrial strength hot wire foam cutter to show us how he incorporates all of his tooling into some of his jobs.
We had some good “Show and Tell” items as well.
Bruce Koch brought in some of his 3D carvings and plaques, cut in beautiful tropical hardwoods, and marble.
Miles Thormodson had a number of wooden puzzles he brought in,and he gave a good talk on the process of building products both on a sub contract and home enterprise basis.
Bret Spaulding drove in from Iowa so he couldn’t bring any of his signage, but he did have a slide show of some of his work set up so we could see the kind of work involved in running a large scale sign company. He also spoke about the process of fabrication and installation.
Tadd Rapant had some pictures of his different products to date, many of which are oriented towards kids.
Gary Sampson showed us how he took existing drawings of airplanes, and converted them into kits for home assembly as toys, and replicas for owners of the full sized versions.
We had a couple of first timers there who hadn’t seen a Shopbot running so at lunch we cut out a Linker Log deer, and then discussed ways to incorporate the Linker Logs and “100kgarages.com” concepts into people’s businesses.
That led into a short session on why web pages are important for those trying to build their businesses, etc.
Many of the Campers had a strong interest in doing 3D work on their machines so we got into the steps involved to create, and cut a number of objects . And that in turn led to a brief “survey” of which software packages might be the most appropriate for people doing different types of work.
I think by the end of the day we all had acquired a new respect for what is possible with a little creativity, and a bunch of foam…..