Aquaplane

Design Competition

Spring 2015

- The Epic Metals Company creates a design competition every year for third year students. Our class was given a weekend to develop a changing facility for Pittsburgh's "Polar Plunge" using the unique properties of the company's products. My partner and I designed a floating changing hut in order to avoid the crowded sidewalks of the downtown riverfront event. Users could place a dry change of clothes in an individual shelving unit before plunging into the cold Monongahela River. Using ladders built in on the sides, they could climb aboard the boat to walk into the changing rooms to grab their dry clothes, change, and then exit the vessel. My partner and I won second place for the design.

In conjunction with Alyssa Hamilton

Getting to the Details

This project also served as an introduction to detailing. Our design uses steel tube as a structure to hold the Epic Metal's products which create the roof and walls of the vessel. Fasteners hold the roofing material to the structure. A system of cables creates a stayed structure which hold the cantilevering walls on the outside. The opaque, exterior walls and the semi-permeable, interior walls (made of a perforated Epic Metal's product), refrain from swinging by being tied down to the floor of the craft. The shelving units are designed to allow placement of clothes outside the hut before plunging, and then access to them when inside (while retaining privacy).

Should the Polar Plunge grow in size as it has been, there is the opportunity to create many of these vessels and join them together. Two can come together to create a symmetrical boat. This can be hauled through a toe-hitch system, and many of them could be linked together.