Building a Guitar

Guitar bodies.
Guitar bodies.

This week I’m learning how to build an electric guitar–from scratch (or almost). Tom Singer, a professor in design and manufacturing at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, is the lead on an NSF funded project to bring guitar building into schools.

I may have a tin ear when it comes to music, but there is quite the interest in guitar playing at the Fulton School at the moment–all the way from the elementary kids to the high schoolers–so I thought it would be a good catch-the-imagination mechanism for use in math and science.

Bodies

A guitar body, ready to become MY guitar.
A guitar body, ready to become MY guitar.

First we got to choose a guitar body. The guitarbuilding team had a fair collection of guitar shapes for the group in the workshop to choose from. The shapes are cut from 1.75 inch thick woo. To get the elegant layered patterns you see above, they laminate about half a dozen different types of wood. This may make for beautiful guitars, but the different densities and hardnesses of the wood have to be considered when working with them. The darker colored woods in the guitar body above were much harder to shave and sand than the lighter colored material.

Note to self: Indeed, if I remember to get hold of some scrap pieces of the different woods, I can probably make up a nice density measuring project. Indeed, it would be nice to have students graph the relationship between density and hardness. Wood hardness is measured on the Janka scale. I suspect there is a positive relationship, but I’d like to see if we could determine the shape of the curve.

Not all of the guitar bodies are beautiful laminates, however. Some, of a single type of wood, are the best candidates for painting. Others are hollowed out, and can be played acoustically as well as plugged in.

Neck and Fretboard

Today I learned what a fretboard is. Apparently it’s a separate piece with the gradational markings that’s attached to the neck.

Bodies, fretboards and necks.
Bodies, fretboards and necks.

The necks were all of maple, if I remember correctly, but the fretboards were made of different types of wood. Each was a single piece of wood, but the wood’s hardness and affects the “brightness” of the sound produced by the guitar.

So now it’s time to sculpt and sand the body, and put all the pieces together.

Viewing the Night Sky with Stellarium

Jupiter shines above the moon. Image generated for St. Louis, MO, USA at 9:30pm on May 31, 2014 using the program Stellarium.
Jupiter shines above the Moon. Image generated for St. Louis, MO, USA at 9:30pm on May 31, 2014 using the program Stellarium.

I received an urgent email last night from a student who, while in the car last night, noticed a bright object above the moon. Was it a planet as her mom suggested? And if so which one? And do planets generate their own light or are we just seeing reflected light?

The last question was the easiest. The planets don’t generate light. You need something big and hot and fusiony, like a star, to generate light.

To figure out what the bright object was I did an internet search for star charts, and came across the Texas Astronomical Society’s webpage “Star Charts for Beginners“, which pointed me to the excellent, free program Stellarium.

You can use Stellarium to generate labeled images of the sky for almost any time, date, and place.

It looks like Jupiter could be seen above the Moon last night.

Dandelion Season

Preparing the flowers for frying.
Preparing the flowers for frying.

The last two weeks have been peak dandelion season here in eastern Missouri, so I’ve been experimenting with the culinary uses of the flowers.

Dipped in batter and fried, the flower heads did not taste like much. Probably too much seasoning and too much batter. It was good advice to cut off as much of the green outer covering (the sepals) because they are bitter. However, if you cut too close to the base of the petals they fall out all over the place, which is good if you want to collect just the petals.

Dandelion flower fritter.
Dandelion flower fritter.

Collecting the petals only is great if you’re trying to make dandelion wine (I’m adapting the second recipe from here), except that I’m only using petals (2 quarts). I keep the same amount of sugar (3 lbs), oranges (4), water (1 gallon), and yeast (winemaker’s). This is the appropriate timing for this project since we just covered the differences between aerobic respiration and fermentation.

Two quarts (about 4 liters) of dandelion flowers for making a gallon of wine.
Two quarts (about 4 liters) of dandelion flowers for making a gallon of wine.

The Chicken Coops are Here

Finding the right place for the chicken coops.
Finding the right place for the chicken coops.

Now that we’re at the end of the academic year, our middle school business’ chicken coops have finally arrived (they were on back order). The kids had some fun finding the right spot for the coops, and we staked out an area for fencing; we plan to clip the birds’ wings.

Although, the coops came pre-assembled, the students needed to make some final adjustments.

Figuring out how the coops work.
Figuring out how the coops work.
Delineating the area for fencing.
Delineating the area for fencing.

Tomorrow, during math, they’ll be finding the perimeter so we can order fencing, and finding the area so we can know how much space we’ll have per bird.

Waves in the Creek

Waves in the creek.
Waves in the creek.

We talked about waves today down at the creek. The water was fairly calm so we could make some nice surface waves using floating leaves to show the up-down/side-to-side motion as the waves passed. I gave them 10 minutes to “play”, and more than one team tried to make a tsunami.

Creating a large wave.
Creating a large wave.

Since it’s allergy season, one student who could not go outside, read the chapter on the characteristics of waves and prepared a short–5 minutes–presentation for the rest of the class when we came back in.

Annotated image highlighting the crests of the waves and the wavelength.
Annotated image highlighting the crests of the waves and the wavelength.

The Apiary is in Business

Placing the nukes into the hives.
Placing the nukes into the hives.

As of this Saturday, we have two bee hives. With bees. Ms. Mertz and Mr. Deitrich received a pair of nukes (bees with a queen in a box) that were driven up, overnight, from Louisiana. They let them acclimatize for a few hours, with the nukes sitting on top of their respective hives, before putting them in. The nukes seem healthy; we were able to identify two queens and the bees were out foraging immediately. Ms. Mertz is happy.

Looking for the queen.
Looking for the queen.