Coach Thrasher
The Physics of Rowing
I was pretty floored to see my senior thesis referenced in Chris Pulman's paper: The Physics of Rowing (also found here: The Physics of Rowing). Having a reference like that is a big change from my engineering papers. Rowing, as a subject area, rocks!
To celebrate this reference, I'm re-publishing the ME4016 Rowing Rigger Design website. I can no longer find a working url at www.vt.edu. It's likely that Dr. Tidwell has moved to another univeristy.
Back on 1997, when the Rowing Rigger Design website was put together, the web was really starting to heat up. We were one of the first projects at Virginia Tech to publish a class project on the web. It was somewhat experimental, and so the website isn't so organized by today's standards. We didn't have content management systems or graphic artists laying things out for us. As a result, it's kind heavy on the -text-.
Enjoy, and let me know if you find the info useful!
Posted at 09:11AM Jan 30, 2006 by jason in Rowing | Comments[2]
Wow. That looks like an awesome project. I remember hearing you say that you did your senior thesis on rowing, but the actual product is just so much more impressive. Did you ever manage to produce some of the designed riggers? Any photos?
Posted by Reid on February 01, 2006 at 05:37 PM PST #
Hi Reid,
We didn't have access to aluminum welding equipment to weld the necessary parts. We would have needed a TIG welder, and a flat welding table to setup jigs to align the parts correctly.
This project was part of ME4016, which traditionally required seniors to participate in the solar car, hybrid car, electric car, or other large industry-centric project. Those projects has access to full machine shops. The Rowing Rigger Design project was actually a proposal that I wrote up, and had to find a sponsor for, in order to move forward. Since it was a student-motivated project, we didn't have access to the full shop.
We did get some electronic testing equipment to setup strain-gauges on a rigger though. We cut up an old rotting Pocock 4+ and created a "test platform" to measure dynamic forces from at the University gym. Not all of the pictures are accessible via the HTML pages, but here are a few that you can manually check:
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image14.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image13.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image15.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image16.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image17.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image22.jpg
http://www.coachthrasher.com/archive/me4016/pictures/image20.jpg
Posted by jason on February 01, 2006 at 08:21 PM PST #