This article isn’t about Camp Quest, not really. It’s about preparing to attend Camp Quest AZ for the 5th time. For me, preparation begins early. It doesn’t have to of course but readers of this Blog probably know by now that I believe in proper preparation.
In February, I discussed the elective that I’ll probably be offering this year. You can read about it HERE.
I’m a program counselor which means I help with the camp programs. There are Electives (4 one-hour sessions), Camp Quest Zones (1 one-hour session), and Free Time activities. I’m on the hook for one Elective and to help on other programs. We normally have one “build” Camp Quest Zone and I usually help running that one. Last year all the campers built solitary bee homes. This year I decided to provide the Elective (Line Tracking Car) and the Quest Zone build activity (The FrogBot). I’ll write about the FrogBot in another posting. Now, about the third storage rack that I’m building…
I built my first storage rack getting ready for Camp Quest AZ 2017, the second one when I was preparing for Halloween 2017. Now, I need yet another so that the campers will have a place to store their Line Tracker Robots between building sessions. As you can see the two that I have are in use and quite full.
Each rack holds up to 25 shoe box sized plastic containers and I expect that I’ll have no more that 24 campers elect to participate in the project. The total number of campers will be about 55 and each camper can choose 2 electives. The other electives include archery, fishing, drama, survival skills, dancing, and other fun stuff. So given the fine choices available and the fact that they can only choose 2, 24 would be a very high number.
What’s it take to build? 51.5 ft of ½” PVC Pipe, 36 “T” fittings, 4 “L” fittings, and 4 caps. Plus, political sign material to make the shelves.
After I designed the unit to fit my needs, I bought all the material except the political sign material was free and available. After the last election, I took down all the signs and stored them behind my backyard shed. Next, I cut the PVC into 10-43″ lengths, 10- 10″ lengths, 4-4″ lengths, and 36-2″ lengths. The hardest part of the build is sanding off all the markings on the pipe. What remains is to glue the parts together and make the shelves out of the political sign material. The shelves are two-ply with the flutes of the corrugated plastic sheet running at 90°. In this case, I’ll have to consider where to NOT glue the fittings to allow me to disassemble the unit for shipment to Camp Quest.
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