Maybe the best news so far!

We have some news which basically assures that our bouldering wall is going to be built and is going to be great! We had a meeting with some of the Student Government people, and they essentially promised us a fair amount of money for our project. They also suggested we go to President Berkey for additional funds so we'd be able to fill the Squash court. A few days later, we met with him and he offered to match what SGA is offering! We're pretty much set now, we just have to do the final tasks leading up to construction: Buying the holds, acquiring keys for the room, writing our IQP paper and so on.

Our wall will be up over the summer and should be fully operational by A-term 2010

Location!

Hello, we have received some pretty excellent news recently - We have permission to use one of the Squash courts in the gym for the location of our bouldering wall! A few weeks ago, we sent an email to many staff members asking how we could get permission to use the room we'd been fighting for, a storage room on the third floor of Olin. As you know, getting permission for this room has been a difficult battle because nobody seems to have the authority to give us the go-ahead. Anyway, instead of giving us permission for that, we got approval for a totally different, much larger and more accessible room. We are all quite excited about this!

Also, D-Term has just started, so we're figuring out meeting times and the like.

Room Tour

Last week, our meeting took the form of a tour around the room we want to build our wall in. We had an employee of RockWerx with us, and we showed him the room so he could have a better idea of the engineering required and to give us more information about how they'd do things. He was excited about the project and didn't foresee any real problems as far as construction would go.

The meeting helped assure us that the room made sense as a place to put our wall and that RockWerx was a good company to trust with building it.

As the term goes on, getting permission to use the room continues to be our last major hurdle.

Tech Wall - Building Holds

When we first started this project, we had the idea of building our own holds to reduce costs and so we could easily acquire transparent ones. As the project got further along, the Tech Wall became a secondary project - plus the Adopt-A-Hold project was an excellent fund-raising tool. Now that we've got some more time on our hands, we're once again thinking about the construction of the Tech Wall.

Building climbing holds is not trivial, of course, but it seems like something we could do at least in small quantities. We've done some research and some begging, and hold companies don't want to give us transparent holds (at least not for cheap!) Our first step for this will be, of course, acquiring the materials. There are a few different ways to make them, we'll probably use a resin/sand combination which is popular among hobbyists.

The project will probably go something like this:
1. Make a mold out of clay using a real climbing hold.
2. Make the resin/sand mixture.
3. Pour that into the mold.
4. Wait for it to harden.
5. Realize we screwed up step 2, do steps 2-4 again.
6. We have a hold! Now we experiment with making our own hold shapes/designs and figuring out how to make it more transparent (this sand thing could make it difficult)

Update and Media

C Term has begun and we've been setting goals, meeting with people and making progress. We've taken some pictures of the Adopt-a-Hold fund raiser we did last term, and we took a picture of the team for press purposes. Speaking of which, there was an article written about us and our project in the Towers. We hope that having publicity and awareness about our project on campus will make people more excited and determined to help see our project through!

One of our two posters for the fund raiser:


A hold engraved by Sanado with the WPI seal and type:


The team: