Most students know that the chairs in the classrooms break all the time. One hundred to 150 chairs are lost per year due to students leaning back in them and using them as footrests.
Mr. Tony Roseberry challenged his welding students to come up with a way to prevent the old chairs from breaking.
Multiple welding students worked together and brainstormed ways to hold the chairs together. The two main solutions they came up with were adding additional welding and welding extra brackets to the bottom of the chair.
“I knew right off the bat that brackets and extra welding would fix the chairs,” senior Brent Bennett said. “It was about a five minute process. It happened really fast.”
Two students, Bennett and Noah Mills, in his advance class came up with the most accurate and beneficial way to fix the old chairs. They identified the problem which was that there is not enough welding and so it does not hold the metal that is on the bottom in its original place.
The lack of welding and the movement of the metal causes the chairs to break.
When Bennett and Mills created a chair that they thought would fix the problem they had a 320 pound student jump in the chair and as a result of the extra welding, the chair did not break. This proved that their solution to the chair would be successful.
“When it was time for the guy to jump on the chair I had no doubts at all that it would not break. I was very confident,” Mills said.
Mr. Roseberry and his welding class have a goal of fixing every chair around the school to decrease the cost of replacing broken chairs.
The price to enhance with their design every single chair in the school is undefined at this time but the cost to fix one chair is $10.
“We still have a few things left before we take this to Mr. Williams and try to put our solution in place,” Mr. Roseberry said.
Some of the steps left to complete is to make sure the fix lasts over time and create a video to show Mr. Williams that will include how the students came up with the solution and all the work the students have put in. They will then take this video to Williams and propose their idea in hopes that they may apply their design to every chair in the school.
