A team of six students in Dr. Tom Descoteaux’s Timber Design class placed seventh in the Fifth National Timber Bridge Design Competition. Team members were Scott Blair, Garrett Gough, Tony Harbath, Nathan Kluemper, Chuck Spivey and Bryan Veale. They competed with other schools across the country in designing a timber bridge, 3 meters long and 1.25 meters wide, which was to be subjected to a test load of 20 kN for a 1-hour duration.

Their design consisted of four Spruce-Pine-Fir S-Dry trusses with joints consisting of plywood gusset plates and wood dowels. The bridge weighed 131.05 kg and deflected 6.09 mm. The 0.57% of non-wood use put the team in first place for that category. Feutz Construction Company of Paris, Illinois, helped test the bridge.

The competition is coordinated by Southwest Mississippi Resource Conservation and Development Inc., and is open to all student chapters of the American Society of Civil Engineers and Forest Products Society in the United States and Canada.

Winner of the 1997 competition was West Virginia University with the University of Missouri-Kansas City in second place and Ohio State University placing third.

Rose’s Civil Engineers showed off their technical prowess, winning the overall performance and construction time in the Steel Bridge competition held at the ASCE Great Lakes Regional Conference held during break at Purdue.

The contest involved designing and fabricating a steel bridge that could hold 2500 pounds. The bridge was then constructed and tested at contest, held on April 6th. The entrants were judged by the amount of time construction took, the weight of the bridge, the amount of deflection caused by the test weight, and aesthetics. Five other schools in addition to Rose submitted bridges: Purdue University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Bradley University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Rose won the construction speed category, using just 13.7 man-minutes of labor in constructing the 20’ long, 5’ high,152 pound bridge. Rose also placed second in both the deflection category, and the efficiency category. These high finishes gave Rose the Overall Performance award, which was based on these factors, as well as the economy of the design. Illinois placed second in the Overall, and Purdue finished at third. This win, Rose’s third in a row, provided an invitation to compete at the National Steel Bridge building Conference, to be held on May 23^rd and 24^th at California Polytechnic- Pomona.

Leading the team to victory was Senior Ryan Seavert. Juniors Pete Haug, Eric Panhorst, Tim Wuestefeld, and sophomore George Lewis IV were the construction crew, while junior Adriano Silva assisted in the construction design and analysis, and sophomore Chad Leinart helped in fabrication. Employees of Terre Haute’s Benchmark Metal Products also helped the team, providing financial and technical assistance.

In the fall of 1996, Fayette Elementary School in New Goshen, IN approached ASCE to help the school layout nature stations. The property is about five acres with a large pond located on one side. Fayette Elementary School plans to locate nature stations on the property to provide the students with a "hands on" laboratory. The school had already constructed a gravel pathway on the property and a few nature stations. However, they experienced a problem with surface water accumulation. A topographic survey was necessary before the location of additional nature stations were determined.

Bryce Clark, Blake Gage, and myself performed the survey. A total station was used to locate approximately 300 points on the property. All of the information collected was stored in a Hewlett Packard data collector. Once the total station shoots a point, the data collector determines its coordinates, elevation, and prompts for a description of the point. The survey took around 4 hours to complete.

Once all of the points were shot, the data was uploaded from the collector into Generic Cadd. The coordinates were used by Generic Cadd to place each point in its precise location. Generic Cadd also displays the elevation and description of each point. A program that runs inside Generic Cadd, called LI Contour, was used to construct accurate contour lines of the property using the elevations. The drafting of the topographic map took approximately 8 hours to complete.

The topographic map was used by the Freshman Intro to Design class to design the stations.