2015 Northern Arizona University Concrete Canoe

2015 Northern Arizona University Concrete Canoe
Project Information

The concrete canoe team is tasked with designing, constructing, presenting, and racing a lightweight, concrete canoe. The canoe must follow all rules provided in the Rules and Regulations handbook by the National Concrete Canoe Committee (NCCC) or point deductions at the conference competition will occur. The competition in which NAU competes is the Pacific Southwest Conference (PSWC) hosted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which NAU has a student chapter for. This conference includes 18 schools from California, Nevada, Hawaii, and Arizona. At the conference, the canoe gets scored in four categories; Final Product, Oral Presentation, Design Paper, and Races. The Final Product includes the canoe itself—its aesthetics and durability, along with the table top display showing features of how our canoe was developed, and the cutaway section showing the different layers applied during construction. The races include five different races, men’s sprint, women’s sprint, coed sprint, men’s endurance, and women’s endurance.

For our school we are limited on time, personnel, and money. We are constrained to work on the canoe only during the current school year, so basically have 9 months before the canoe needs to be ready for racing. We are a smaller school and have only a team of 5 members, while the competing schools have 30+ teams. Finally, as we are a smaller school, funding is hard to come by, and so any required purchases the team needs to cover ourselves. We had a budget of $7,000 while the top competing schools have more than $60,000.

Our final canoe design took into consideration, hull design, concrete mixture, and aesthetic aspects. All of these features are discussed in our design paper located in the documents link. This design paper also shows an AutoCAD drawing of how the mold was fabricated and the Gantt chart for our project. Photographs of our final canoe product are displayed in the conference tab.