This year a few friends and I dressed up as characters from the movie “Robin Hood Men in Tights”. Yes, this outfit required the wearing of bright green tights.

Early in the day before the festivities started uptown I made a triple batch of my mother’s epically delicious award winning chili. This recipe normally only requires one pound of ground beef, I used closer to three and a half pounds, so you can imagine the amount of chili that was consumed by Robin Hood and his merry men.

Other friends were also present for the dinner with costumes ranging from Loofas (the shower things) to witches, Bob Ross the painter, and even Batman graced us with his presence. Overall it was a great Halloween weekend with no rain and not too cold of weather.

I regularly ride here in Athens at Sells Park and Strouds Run State Park. Both Sells and Strouds are within riding distance from my apartment and have great trails which are maintained by the local bike shops and clubs. When I have a little extra time, I take the half hour drive out to Lake Hope State Park which has 17+ miles of trails to ride. In my opinion, Ohio University is a mountain biker’s (or any outdoor lover’s) dream.

So far we have formed teams and found customers within the community. The team that I am on is working with a boy who has Muscular Dystrophy primarily in his shoulders and hips, which confines him to an electric wheelchair. This boy also participates in wheelchair sports on a regular basis in Lancaster, Ohio. His need is that he is unable to shoot the basketball because of his limited range of mobility and strength in his arms.

Our idea right now is to make a spring loaded shooting device that will load automatically and then have a trigger to launch the ball towards the basket. Much of the work up to this point has been scheduling meetings and working on determining the specific need so that creating such a device will potentially be easier in the near future. This project will move towards creating prototypes by the end of this quarter beginning of winter quarter.

My group’s customer is the owner of a local vending business called Adam’s Rib. She makes some fantastic barbeque ribs but currently she can’t make enough of them. She is stuck using a very small charcoal grill because she can’t lift a bigger one in and out of her truck. Our team is going to design a larger grill that she can set up by herself. We have selected the team name OU BBQ. Our team’s website is http://sites.google.com/site/teamoubbq/home if you would like to track our progress throughout the year.

For the past few weeks I have been working on an idler mechanism that will put tension in the belt that goes from an electric motor to the press that will extract the oil from the seed. It has been a long process trying to figure out a good design. Finally, this week I was able to track down idler pulleys from Tractor Supply Co. that would work for my application. Now I am just waiting on parts to come in so I can begin putting everything together. I hope to have this mechanism installed within the next week.

While at Honda, I tested the emissions control systems of new models to verify that they pass various federal and international regulations. Working with pre-production cars that the public doesn’t even know about is very exciting and rewarding because the work really matters to the company. I have really enjoyed all of my co-op experiences at Honda. Doing a co-op is an excellent way to see what an engineer does and to see what positions you do or do not like.