2019 DAY 3: Concrete and Heavy Equipment

For the third day, campers were able to get hands-on experience with the diverse professions involved in concrete and heavy equipment. Before assisting in pouring and smoothing concrete for the basketball court, RangerACE Pros Hamilton McRae and Ryan Davis arrived to introduce campers to the engineering side of concrete.

RangerACE Pro Ryan Davis walking a camper through how to set up the “slump test”.

The world of concrete is much more nuanced than many think, with each job requiring a different mix of concrete to fulfill that job’s requirements. There are multiple tests that go along with this, and McRae and Davis came to demo a few of these. After mixing a fresh batch of concrete with the campers, our RangerACE Pros started off by teaching the “slump test”, which measures the consistency of concrete to see if it’s suitable for a job. Campers filled up the hardware seen to the left, pulled it up leaving just the concrete, and then measured how far the concrete had slumped.

After this test, campers filled up small tubes with concrete and set them out to dry. In McRae and Davis’s line of work, these tubes are sent off to a lab where they are tested to see how much pressure they can withstand. Due to the time and resources doing so takes, campers would simply be able to take their concrete-filled tubes home as souvenirs at the end of camp.

At this point, concrete trucks were on site and their crews were ready to begin pouring. Once the concrete was poured, campers were able to assist in smoothing the concrete with variable size trowels. Once campers were satisfied with how smooth the concrete was, they headed inside to learn more about concrete.

A camper getting to sit in the cabin of a dozer while a RangerACE Pro explains its steering and functionalities.

Following with the theme of hands-on learning, RangerACE Pro Kyle Clark rode out 4 unique and specialized trucks to an area behind the camp. Before campers got acquainted with this machinery, they worked through a set of scrambled puzzle pieces with various heavy equipment on them. Through unscrambling these puzzle pieces, with the help of RangerACE Pros and equipment manuals, campers learned all about the equipment they would be seeing.

For the rest of the afternoon, campers split up into two groups. The first of these got to explore the heavy equipment with RangerACE Pros, learning about the intricacies of each machine as well as actually getting to sit inside them (not operate). Campers had tons of questions for the Pros about the machines and, despite the complex buttons on each, quickly found the horn buttons.

While a group demo’d the equipment, the other group watched a skid steer tear up the asphalt in a courtyard behind the school. Campers would be revisiting this courtyard on Friday, when Clean Scapes came in to help fill in and transform the courtyard into a more usable and visually appealing space.