Good evening everybody!

It’s Matt from the OAVS Capstone group at the University of Maine. Winter break is winding down to an end with spring semester starting on the 14^th of January. Good news from the capstone team, we’re all back in the Orono area now and getting ready to finish fabricating and assembling the flow bench. Almost all of the parts and materials have been ordered and received at this point. The delayed shipment of metal stock that Forest mentioned in a previous blog post finally came in today which is great! The only things left to get are some sheets of plywood which Dan and I will be doing this week. While I’ve been playing the part of the procurement department over the past week or two, Forest and Jon have been working on fabricating the frame for the bench. While Dan was home he used his sawmill to make us some wood inserts for the bench top, which we’ll be laser etching with our sponsors’ names. Speaking of sponsors, Jon has talked to Mikah Barnett of All Angles Design and he’s agreed to donate his latest catch can design for testing. So a big thanks to Mikah and All Angle’s Design for the support, and thanks to all of our sponsors for all of your help, this capstone project is only doable because of your generosity and I know I speak for the whole capstone team when I say that. Well I think that sums it up for now. Take a look at the pictures below to see what we’ve been up to so far, and we’ll be checking in with the readers later on this week with some more updates!

Here we have the frame of the bench all welded together.

And here's what the first test run through the laser etching machine came out looking like...

Until Next time everybody!