My Next Project

I have started a project this summer with the hopes of entering the final result into a competition to win an Ipod Touch. The project is that I am modeling my paintball gun in CAD. Then I will render it to make it look really slick and enter it into a visualization competition that Siemens, the company who makes the CAD system I use (NX), puts on. I haven't done much interactive CAD modeling since I took ME 172 in 2006, so I'm hoping this will help me remember some of my lost interactive CAD modeling skills. If you don't know, I do lots of CAD every day, but most of the stuff I do is writing computer programs to do what I want to do. Mainly I am posting pictures on here to show Shanna because she was wondering if I had modeled any cool parts yet.

This is the knob that controls the speed of the paintballs.

This is a guard on the back of the gun that protects the hammer.

This is the hammer that pushes the paintballs out of the barrel.

This is the barrel.

So I haven't modeled a ton of parts yet, or done much to make them look realistic, but it's coming along. Maybe I'll post more here as I go.

Disc Golf - Spanish Fork Course

Yesterday I had the chance to go down to Spanish Fork in order to play their disc golf course. I went disc golfing a few weeks ago with some friends from my church up in American Fork and every since then, I have been itching to go again. I've been reading about the different types of discs that are out there and which disc is good for what.

I decided that I wanted a few more to try out, so I placed an order online to get two new discs. One was the Discraft Buzzz which seems to be one of the best all-around discs on the market. I also picked up the Innova Starfire which is supposedly the best for sidearm throwers, which is me. Surprisingly, even though the order was received on Monday, the discs arrived by mail on Thursday. Perfect timing, I thought, as I got excited about giving the discs a try on Saturday morning.

I had invited about 50 people to go with me, but all refused. So I got up bright and early at 7:00 and set off on my own. The course is located just off of the old highway (89) by some railroad tracks just outside of Spanish Fork Canyon. The course is built around an old gravel pit at the mouth of the canyon. It was pretty easy to find and I was somewhat surprised that I was the only person there on a Saturday morning. As I sat in my car getting my stuff ready, I chalked my being alone to the fact that it was still fairly early in the morning. When I finally got out of my car, my reasoning was proven to be wrong.

As I stepped out onto the course, I was met by gale force winds. Immediately, I realized that I was the only one on the course because the wind was blowing at around 30 miles per hour. It turns out that I picked the exact wrong time to go to that course. The chart below shows the average wind speed at the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon by season as a function of the time of day. And as you can see, 7:00 am is right at the peak of the wind speed curves for each season. I don't know if it's spring or summer right now, but the wind almost knocked me over at times, so I would assume the wind on Saturday was summer wind. It's no wonder they installed a bunch of wind generators there.

Being the trooper that I am, and not wanting all the gas I used to go to waste, I stayed and played the round of 18 holes. I actually pared several of the holes. But most of the time, the wind had its way with me. The wind caused several things to happen depending on what disc I threw or how I threw it. Sometimes it would lose all lift and just drop 5 feet almost instantly, sometimes the wind would double the lift and throw the disc sky high. On throws with any rotation relative to the ground at all, the wind would stop all forward motion and rotate the trajectory almost 90 degrees.

There are two throws that typified my day. The first throw was actually pretty decent. It went straight about 60 yards and then skipped across the ground to within about 20 feet of the basket. However, as it skipped the wind picked up and lifted it about 10 feet off of the ground where another gust pushed it backwards and to the left, causing it to move off of the hill top "green" and roll down the hill until my new position was slightly shorter than 60 yards from the basket and much farther to the left. Of course, my next throw then had to be made directly into the wind.

My second representative throw was made from about 30 yards from the basket. This throw was made directly into the wind. There was a telephone throw about 20 yards ahead on my right. After I released the disk I could see it drifting right, but I thought it would miss the pole. It didn't. It nicked the pole, which opened up the bottom of the disk to a nice gust. The gust pushed the disc up and backwards. The disc came to rest about 15 yards behind where I actually threw it from originally.

So that was basically my day. The course I thought would be really fun if it weren't so windy. It was built around a gravel pit, so while down in the pit, the wind wasn't quite so bad. However, most of the tees and baskets were up an top of hills, which made it really hard to put and drive effectively. I was really happy with the pars that I did get though and I'd love to play there again without the wind.

On a side note, because of the gravel and wind, I decided not to try my new discs out in order to preserve their newness and not subject them immediately to dings, chips, and scratches. Maybe next time...