FW: Bruce & Laurie: 05/18/97

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce and Laurie Winter [mailto:winter@isl.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 1997 5:49 PM
To: 'Annie Tate'; 'Brad and Sue Page'; Lynette Schwend (E-mail); 'Mal &
Kim Winter'; Mal and Beth Winter (E-mail); 'Mike and Becky Hjelvik';
'Paul Kitamura'
Subject: Bruce & Laurie: 05/18/97

Happy B-day Mom! We will be giving you a call later today after Zack and
Laurie get back. Zack has spent the weekend camping with a friend and
Laurie is hot-tubbing with Janet.

Nick and I have been doing his Science homework this weekend. We have been
timing and graphing how long it takes various sized marbles to travel down
various places. We currently have the living room populated with all sorts
of planks, tubes, vacume hoses, and water hoses. The trip down the water
hose from the entry way to the basement was our longest (3.5 seconds) until
we got the idea of having the marbles "swim" down a bottle of Karo Syrup.
The 'bb' set our current world record: 9.45 seconds!

A few weekends ago, Zack and a buddy (David) spent a few hours attaching a
large (D size) Estes Rocket engine to the back of a 4 inch metal dump truck,
with the intent of setting a new land speed record in the 4 inch metal dump
truck category. These hard-full rocket engines are designed to propell
rockest UP, so I was a little unsure of the safety of this. But they
convinced me they would stand well back, so we all went out to our
cul-de-sack and set up a horizontal launch platform.

We had about 7 misfires, due to various problems with the electronic
ignition system. The electronic fuse just would not ignite, even after
dis-assembly, re-assembly, and re-engineering of the whole thing. Finially,
Zack gave up and designed his own ignition system, using 40 feet of wire
from somewhere (... I got to check on where that came from ...) and a large,
high-powered battery from one of his remote controled something-or-others.

After each misfire, the "we will stand WAY back" rule was violated just a
little bit more, so by the 8th attempt, the boys in charge were probably
just a bit too close. Also, we had most of the neighboorhood had joined in
by now. So when the thing actually ignited, we were caught a bit by
surprise. The Engine blasted the Truck about 10 feet before it broke away
and went airborn, putting on quite a show. Then it landed about 5 feet from
David (whos Mom had just driven up to witness what our safety technique),
sat there a few seconds, then exploded the "parachute charge" and died.

The reaction from the boys at this near-death experince: "COOL!!!!"

Love to all.

Bruce