"For people??"

OK, so I had to make the lonely sojourn to the Waterfront so that I could get some large rubber-band type stuff to make our catapult for the impromptu MechE project (build a glider and launcher so that it goes >=30ft or travels at least 10ft while remaining aloft for at least 30 sec). I had to make this trip alone because Drew was swamped with work, and due to room-draw stuff taking longer than expected (never mind the fact that I could have given Drew my driver's liscense without me having to be there myself) Joel couldn't come along becuase of a meeting he had to attend at 5:30. I left CMU ~4:15 on the 61C and was dropped off at the bridge over the Waterfront. I had to walk almost the entire length of it to get to the Loew's. Fortunately, I found everything fairly promptly.
I quickly discovered their display of bungies and packing rubber bands (those are the big black rubber bands with metal hooks you've seen on large trucks holding down cargo) and was staring at the various options, contemplating what to buy when a sales associate came over to ask if I needed any help. I asked if there were any other places with bungies in the store. No, but what was I going to use them for? A catapult I said. His reply "...for people??" Cause of course that's the first thing I'd build a catapult for.

Right, so...I also managed to help Drew price out castor wheels for The Wiz and it turns out they're only 1/2 as expensive as he'd originally guessed. Woot. That and the fact that Paul's Lumber's Lauan (yes, that is how you spell it) is ~$5 cheaper than expected means that the carpentry budget was significantly less than originally figured. I bought the bungies and whatnot after staring longingly at some of the drill presses and screw guns they had thoughtfully placed on the way to the registers. I headed over to the nearest Bus stop and proceeded to wait for the 59U, the only bus that uses that stop that would get me back to Oakland and CMU. I waited and waited. I saw Scott, with whom I work on SAE throttle stuff, drive into Loews. I waited and waited some more. Every other bus that used that stop passed through and at least 1 bus that was simply heading to the garage. Eventually Scott and his friend Jay finished at Loews and they offered me a ride back to campus, after a brief stop at Chick-fil-a (spelling?).

Anyway, for such a car enthusiast, Scott has a pretty ghetto car. It's a Crown Vic from the late 80's, I think. No airbags but it does have cruise control. Or did, at least. As we were heading out to the highway from the parking lot, Scott asked Jay "Why don't we pick up more chicks with this thing?" I mean, I certainly can't figure it out. That and the hole in the exhaust system that makes the car sound like one of those crazy-tuned civics with the frisbee-sized muffler. Except that this is only a bad sound.

After I got back to campus I headed over to the U for some dinner. I had Salisbury steak (fancy-sorta looking meatloaf, often accompanied by mushrooms) with gravy. mmm...gravy. The more exciting part about dinner was that I spotted the Nutbag sitting eating dinner on my way in. I was very excited, we hadn't seen each other/talked in quite a while. We've both been really busy. She'd burned her tounge earlier on account of piping hot Asiana food and her general impatience, and so her chicken caeser wrap wasn't working out so well for her. Regardless, congrats to the Nutbag for landing an awesome sounding job for the summer!

Following the quite-pleasant dinner I headed over to the Dungeon after calling Joel and started slapping together a rough mock-up of what I had in mind. Joel got down there and was generally in agreement with the concept. He had some great suggestions about how to ensure the block, pulled by the bungies, didn't jump out of the launcher itself. We got to cutting all the wood out and ended up using the old table saw a lot because it's lack of handgaurd allowed us to make cuts that we couldn't with the newer one.
Currently we've got a solid launcher design that needs the launcher/glider interface ironed out and some vigorous testing, also.
Additionally, we need to work on our release mechanism: when we use a single bungie, really too weak, we think, the u-shaped bolt can hold the two eye-hooks together alright, but when we add the second bungie, it's just no longer an option. Currently, what we've figured out is to use a small zip-tie to attach the eye-hooks and then cut the tie when we want to 'fire' the launcher.
Tomorrow we'll actually attach the 'arresting hook' to the plane and do lotsa testing outdoors, hopefully everything'll work out great. I'll link to pics when we get some taken of the launcher and our awesomely cool looking plane. It kicks the balsa out of all the other one's I've seen.