Building a Compost Sifter

My E4 team has been building for the past few weeks, and our compost sifter is finally nearing completion! All we have left to build are the cam (which will lift and drop the frame) and the screen holder.

Here are some pictures of our accomplishment!


This is Claire, standing in front of the lumber we used to build the compost sifter. We used 4 by 4's for the front post and 2 by 4's for the rest of the frame.


Some of the wood we just screwed together with 4" screws. (We had to drill pilot holes first, or the screws would get stuck.)


For corners, we used brackets to hold the wood together and then screwed the brackets to the wood.



This is Daniel bracing the frame of the compost sifter while someone (not shown in picture) drills on another part of the frame. Our sifter will be a little over 4 feet tall when we're finished.

This is the almost-finished sifter (minus screen and cam). When it's finished, there will be an aluminum pole on the front with a cam on it. When the cam spins, the frame that holds the screen will raise and then drop, forcing the compost through the screen.

That's a picture of the screen-holder frame lifted up from the rest of the sifter. The rubber that will cushion its fall (to make it not deafeningly loud) is from an old bike tire that the Pitzer bike shop gave us.

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E4 has, at times, been really fun. Building this compost sifter was fun (for the first 2 consecutive hours in the machine shop; after that, I get bored and have to take a break). My current group is really awesome--we're pretty laid-back, so it's easy not to get stressed even when we have a lot to do. Other parts of E4 have been less fun--for example, being in the shop at 11:30 on a Saturday night, trying to learn how to do carpentry for the first time (while building), and not knowing the physics you need to know to model all of your designs (some of which have pretty complicated physics). The engineering curriculum here is a lot of work. When I say a lot of work, I mean a lot of work. My team spent most of Friday and Saturday building. (We did it in 2-person shifts, so we didn't all have to be there the whole time, but that's still a lot of time in the machine shop.) We still have some building to do, and then we have to finish writing up a tech memo which sums up everything we did and then make a presentation detailing everything we did. If you really enjoy every part of the engineering process--not just the design and the building, but the write-ups and the presentations and the organizational things--then you'll love it. If you're like me, you like designing and building things, but not all the other stuff. I'm changing my major to CS because the other stuff is a substantial enough portion of the engineering curriculum to deter me. I still like building stuff. I still like figuring out how things work. I just can't make myself interested enough in all the other parts of the engineering curriculum to really enjoy an engineering major. I really liked CS my first semester. Programming and engineering are really quite similar--you're trying to make a [thing] that performs [function]. So, in a sense, I'll still be making things. Just different things than I thought I would make when I first came to Mudd.