This year the canoe team faced many difficulties and challanges during the project. The following are some challanges the team faced and what was done to resolve them:
A difficulty the NAU ASCE concrete canoe teams face each year is the amount of time allotted for the project. The project time frame was from Sept. 1st, 2010 to March 23rd, 2011.The canoe project was estimated to be approximatly 1200 hours over the course of the seven months. By the start of January (4 months complete), the team had already logged over 1000 hours, which was an indication that the project needed more time than what was originally thought. The team had put more effort into the project after January 1st when actual construction started in order to meet deadlines and to be prepared for any unforseen problems that may arise. By the end of the project the team had logged over 1500 hours but the time challanged was faced with the additional effort put in by the design team.
When the team started making actual batches of concrete, the team had originally made a few batches and then came to realize that the batches did not meet the rules and regulations. The team resolved this issue and made new batches of different concretes.
The next issue was a few batches were deemed by the team to be too "soupy" to use. "Soupy" refers to how the concrete mix would behave. Would it stay on the sides of the bucket or slump back down? If the mix would slump off of the sides fairly rapidly then it was deemed a soupy mix which the team foresaw it as being an issue for when it was time to pour the canoe. The team did not have confidence in the soupy mixes to be able to hold themselves up on the side walls of the canoe. Therefore, those mixes were scratched from the possible selection. The team discovered through batch testing that the mixes had a cementitious material content that was too high with all of the other materials in the mix which caused it to be "soupy".
During the pour day for the canoe, an issue of the concrete slumping down had occured. The team attempted to account for this by seeing how the concrete mixes acted in the lab, however, the concrete would still slump down at a slow pace. The team resolved this issue by laying the concrete and in a very short amount of time (less than 15 minutes) would set in the reinforcement mesh. This mesh helped keep the concrete from slumping as much and the mesh was held up with clamps to provide additional slump resistance.
After the canoe had been allowed to cure, the team discovered that one of the bulkheads had not been set up to properly seal the concrete in which allowed the concrete to slump from its form. This was a problem for the canoe team due to it made a large block of concrete at the head of the canoe where it was not supposed to be. The team fixed this issue by grinding and sanding down the area and repatching it to make a smooth surface. The bulkhead had a form remade and the bulkhead was repoured.