Originally Posted by
JohnnyEgo
Sadly, it's definitely a garage, not a shop. Everything is on wheels so my wife can park her car back in there in the evenings, and she frowns upon piles of sawdust gently raining down every time the garage door opens, so it is kept clean out of necessity and fear.
It's an interesting balance. One of my son's friends is doing a bridge experiment, where you design different bridges and see how much weight they will support. I remember a friend of mine doing something very similar way back when we were in 5th grade. The difference is that my son's friend's bridges were clearly designed in Solidworks and accompanied by finite element analysis prints. Even more impressive to me is that the bridges were 3D printed somehow with a color spool such that they have the FEA color map printed on the surface. I am not sure I could do either of these things, let alone a 10 year old. Coincidentally, his dad's a mechanical engineer, but I am sure that has no bearing. I go back and forth over whether I do too much or not enough on this type of thing, but at the end of the day, I still end up frog-marching him towards active involvement in his own education, even when it would be faster, less stressful, and there would be much fewer obscenities uttered by either of us if I did it myself.
