A/V Geeks at the Hunt Library - Model Rockets!

all right welcome everyone to av geeks at the hunt library not at the hunt library i'm virginia ferris from nt state university libraries and this is our 15th semester of this series partnering ncsu folks with raleigh's av geeks to discuss vintage educational and classroom films skip alzheimer the founder of av geeks is an nc state alum he has been for the last few decades collecting films made throughout the last century mostly 16 millimeter educational training and other sorts of how-to movies and he does an amazing job sharing them with the world skip currently houses over 36 000 such films at the av geeks archive here in raleigh and he shares them as stock footage for films and exhibits as research material and during public events like this one so today's theme is let's talk about making things and we're thrilled to welcome our guest justin haynes one of our colleagues at the libraries here justin is a library specialist managing the day-to-day operations of the library's makerspace he's a two-time graduate from the college of education here at nc state and loves sharing his passion of making with others a hobbyist and tinkerer by nature justin enjoys the process of building things but also enjoys repairing or repurposing items to create something new so welcome justin and to everyone out there just a reminder that over 200 of av geeks compilations are available for check out from the libraries and you can also visit avgeeks.com or search for av geeks in youtube or at archive.org so i'll hand things over to skip to kick us off watch virginia um justin i'm excited to have you here and one of the reasons is because i found out that um i have access to a lot of films about model rockets um and we're going to be watching some that i digitized for the prelinger archives and some that uh are part i digitized for nc state um we've got three films um but tell me right off the bat justin like why why are you doing what you do like how did you get to this point uh yeah so uh my original passion in life was landscape architecture i wanted to design parks and um things like that until uh my architecture teacher in high school um convinced me to try teaching for a living um i'd helped a bunch of other people in class and stuff like that so my formal background is in education and i was going to be a teacher until my student teacher experience and uh realized that that might not be the best for me but i really enjoyed working with the students and all that so looking at other opportunities for me to share my passion you know for making and creating things with others and this was around the same time that the maker space in the libraries had started the bigger space that we have in the hill library so i was able to come back for grad school i was going to get my masters in education see what doors that opens and lo and behold i kind of fell luckily into this job and that was five years ago now so i'm able to kind of help all the students with all these different projects i'm able to have a a wide array of tools at my disposal so that you know that hobbyist in me can continue to try out the newest 3d printers and all the other cool stuff that i don't have to buy for myself because it's at my job so that's kind of an awesome experience and um it just kind of is a natural fit for me the way i go about you know my day-to-day life looking at new opportunities and new ways to create things some creative problem solving which is like my one of my my favorite things to do you tell people because we have people watching from all different backgrounds and different ages including some that haven't been in college for you know 30 years um what is a maker space yeah so a makerspace more than anything else is you know a collection of people so i'm in the in the instance of a physical space um it's a place where there's tools um that as a community for a community so that multiple people can go there you see those popping up in k-12 places universities even like your public libraries and some private institutions um private businesses are open in these places so that everyone can kind of come to one physical space and create things now being in in that field i say it's much more than that physical space it's the people that are in there the friends that you meet in our instance i have student staff who actually staff the space so it's a mixture of those staff members with the patrons that we see coming through our doors and those relationships and um really when you see a you know you see an engineering student meet a graphic designer and they then meet a person from the college of humanities and then they all work on a project together which would have never happened um in their normal curriculum but in the real world that's that's what happens everyone you work with isn't going to be the same background that you are so um that's sorry that's a little bit probably longer than what is a maker's face i mean and so when i went to nc state initially in the 80s i was in computer science but then we shared a building with uh the school of design and they had a variety of tools they had a shop they had a wonderful computer lab with at the time the most up-to-date mac ses and color max uh and also the you know they had this amazing cage where you could check out all sorts of audio visual equipment and so i switched over to school of design because there was such this amazing place to do creative things and you know you're supposed to do them for your projects but i did all sorts of extracurricular things so having a makerspace i get very excited when i visit the libraries at nc state and see like oh wow man i wish i was in school we get a lot of parents returning and saying wow i really wish i had a place like this when i was here and it's kind of awesome to hear that like you know i take it for granted every once in a while and then when i meet someone that is their first time it allows me to kind of like re kind of ground myself i'm like this is super cool like this is a great place to have yeah a lot of those a lot of those tools that you probably saw that's you know those places like that now are almost considered maker spaces right okay so we're gonna watch films that involve model rocketry in different ways or models in different ways and they all have different goals the first film is called charlie's atlas and this is kind of a weird uh film that it you know it kind of is talking about the burgeoning aerospace industry but it's all through the eyes of a kid um and the dreams and hopes of the kid but it's it's non-narrative so it's it's kind of a strange wonderful film that kind of was made to kind of celebrate what was happening at that time in the 50s and in 60s so here's charlie's atlas [Music] three one [Music] you [Music] so going from a bottle rocket to a uh atlas rocket is it's fascinating and i i think that film captures kind of that glee um that early rocketry had of um that i still think people have when they uh are um you know any type of space launch there's this excitement there's just this oh what's gonna happen um so yeah every time i see a rocket blasting off or like it doesn't matter if it's the first time or the 20th time it's that same pause and watching the entire time and i guess the thing to realize is if you look at the history of rocketry it started with a lot of young people doing this a lot of young people um starting rocketry groups all around the world and sharing information and you know talking about the formulations on how to like goddard very early on and jack parsons and all these other people were developing these things as part of these groups because before they became formalized and before they were brought into academic or industrial uh or government settings um so uh there was a lot of that young let's let's pop pack a bunch of chemicals in here and see what happens um did you ever have uh do any model rocketry when you were a kid um one year for my birthday i got a model rocket kit um but i i'm from western north carolina a lot of woods a lot of elevation change i never you know never actually shot off the model rocket but one kind of side story i i as a kid loved taking my toys that i had tearing them apart after they broke or i broke them on purpose sometimes um sorry parents if you're watching this now so breaking those apart hot gluing them back together to make new things and combining them into other toys and so i actually had a batmobile toy that you know we've all seen the scenes of the batmobile where it's it hits the rocket boost and it's flying through the streets um well so i had the rockets from my model rocket and i attempted to to recreate that scene on the sidewalk in the front of our house my launch was definitely not as successful as the bottle rocket we saw in the in the clip there it maybe sputtered a few feet before my plastic batmobile melted into the concrete so beyond repair so yeah i had a i had a little estes rocket um you know it was about this big and we painted it orange because we knew because it was so small that it didn't even have a parachute to it like that was what we were aspiring to is and uh so yeah i put it together with my dad and we we made like a launcher which wasn't very straight um and so it launched but you know didn't go very far and thankfully it was orange so i could find it but um i think it was not as dramatic as i had hoped there was a lot of work to get to that point and i was like well no okay and it's one of those things like you you expect this moment and we even saw like the slow-mo scene in the clip where like tom stood still and his rocket launched off like that's the moment you're always anticipating and then um sometimes your the thing you build or the model or whatever it might you know only launch 20 feet up in the air or it might melt into the sidewalk and it's not the picture-perfect moment that we anticipated so but that's all that's with all models it's not even just rockets so no of course and and that's the thing is i certainly did what you did uh with uh melting intentionally melting um models and things like that and i actually have like a scar from melted plastic dripping on my skin from that um all right so uh this next film is from the north carolina state special collections um and the agricultural extension office uh they had a tv show uh which um would feature it would be shown in north carolina and north carolina tv stations and it would feature different interest stories related to whatever and this one was related to 4-h of which i was a member actually and um this was a 4-h uh boy who i think is he was doing model rocketry for his project when you do 4-h you have a annual project that you have to do and if you finish it then you get you don't get a badge or anything but you get to go to the state fair for free and so this is what he did is uh and he's talking to the host who has an amazing southern accent and so this is a rocket maker from the 4-h um so let me switch over [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is randy killebrew from edgecombe county and he's going to show us his uh rocket launch pad and tell us all about how he happened to go into this interesting sort of thing randy how long have you been working with launching rockets well i started when i was about nine years old so i've been working with it for about five years now so you're 14 yes ma'am uh-huh now did you build all this yourself yes ma'am oh and what's the uh the little box i got right here in front of me you said we had to sit down because you got to work that what's that well it's control box oh yeah that's that's like at houston yes ma'am and what's in that well the wires are hooking up to the um different switches like here's the selector switch safety key switch the check light and the push button firing switch oh and then that's all connected with those two batteries yes ma'am and then where does it go it goes up to the model rockets to these wires here at each launch page the wires in front of each of those launch pads and when you push the switch then something's supposed to happen yes well i don't think here in the studio we've got to launch them but you can give us sort of a reasonable facsimile can't you of what happens how you going to do it well i'll just show you how they launch i'll i'm gonna leave the igniters out of the model rocket engine and they'll be just be lighting in front of the launch pads and you're gonna start with the one on this end yes ma'am all right let's see what happens and launch pad one then okay then oh my now look at launch pad too all right gee now launch pad three launch pad 4 now next launch pad 5 and now launch pad 6. now if you had had those connected to the rocket they would have gone through the ceiling of at least made a a real try wouldn't they yes ma'am how'd you get interested in this well i saw adding catalog and it was like seven dollars for a starter kit so i sent in for it and then to what to make a rocket is that what it said um oh really this was completely put together i didn't have to put anything together then and then later on i got interested in kits where you put the rockets and all together yourself and that's what these are you but you put all these together yourself yes man i built all these model rockets and built your little stand yes man my launch pad and of course you made this too yes ma'am well you've been with it for for a number of years and uh is this going to be your life work well a lot to go into electrical engineering which would really be something similar but you could there's so many branches out from electrical engineering you don't have to really be with rockets do you no no well maybe you'll go to school at state someday that's where i'm hoping to go oh good what uh grade are you in now i'm going to be in the ninth grade ninth grade and you got another project underway well i'd like to work for electrical project also oh you want to try that too well that's a good one and from the looks of what you've done here i expect that uh you know you'd do real well with that you gonna get started on that right away well i've been started on it for about a year now and what are you working with on it now well i've been rewiring various buildings around my house now good gracious like i did a complete electrical repair job on our pack house well that's wonderful do you have to have somebody come out and expect inspect that kind of work no ma'am so well you inspect it don't you yes ma'am you know all the safety rules yes ma'am i believe you do because you're very careful you said you had a safety switch right there so that uh proves that you are safety conscious well this is certainly an interesting project for you and i hope that you can go on into electrical engineering we'll be looking for you to come to state it's been been fun randy kilabrew from edgecombe county with his rockets so great um so the uh the striped uh s because those are all asses model rockets i don't know if there were other companies but that seemed to be the one that had great distribution to all the hobby shops across the united states and had advertising um but uh yeah the one that was striped is the model that i had and uh somebody in the comments was saying that when they saw all those ignition fuses being burnt it was lamenting um because those were not cheap and that's what i remember about this was you know you had all these consumables you had a consumable uh you know little jet tube you had a consumable fuse and that's that's it you know you use that it's spent you can't just keep using them so i think that was one of the reasons that my interest wayne is like oh my gosh we spent all this money to get and we only get one launch out of it like what it it seems like they were like yeah they were trying to like teach you a lesson as a kid that like you didn't want to learn like oh you just can't do this over and over again like um yeah the igniter budget i think definitely took up their furniture budget for the the video there so um but yeah it was it was awesome um then you know that was the first video that you know we had i'd watch whenever y'all approached me to do this one and uh i was hooked so that it was it was awesome um one thing i like that that one shows us is like uh that like deep dive mentality that makers have where it's like he didn't just have that one rocket on display he had seven i think is what it was and it was like once someone gets into a hobby especially model making or recreation and stuff like that they just it's a rabbit hole that people go down and i'm guilty of it i'm sure you might be as well and others out there so yeah the um i think it was interesting the host said oh you have a safety switch on there um you're so your safety conscience is like no he just doesn't want to have like all of them go off at the same time it's funny hearing that and then him just wiring his house like at the same time i was just like now i thought if i want to wire something i have to have someone come out and uh tell me tell me i did it right yep so it was kind of funny i need to look up let's see if we can figure out if that person ever did make it to state yeah that would be good to know so it'd be good to know um and what it reminded me of is so you have young people doing this um it reminded me i would say like maybe 10 years ago there was a whole thing where people were taking weather balloons and they were putting cameras on them and they were just letting them go up and they had a way to link with the camera in some way so you could get all these amazing i remember seeing this video of a hello kitty doll that was up almost you know and the ionosphere you know in one of those levels where it was way high up and um being very excited that oh wow they just did they just took a weather balloon and they just did this and there they go and you know that they basically let a camera potentially die um and i guess that's the thing now with model rockets is now you have cameras in them um relatively inexpensive and so you get that kind of payoff of seeing it take off which you didn't have that before yeah you know i think that's the part that like every kid that you know wants to be an astronaut or rocky sign like they want to see the earth back down like it's cool to watch it go up and but you're really paying off for that you know there's that's why there's that scene in every space movie where like they look back at the earth and it's you know that blue and green blob that they get to see and it's just um now with technology advanced so much where the cameras are so can be disposable at this point or the addition of gps and bluetooth into these rockets where you can even hopefully get it back more than you know walking through the woods for 30 minutes looking very rocket so so related to technology i mean since you were a kid to now i mean so the you know you're taking and smashing uh or taking broken toys and re putting them together with hot glue i mean it's clear that the the maker space and the idea of 3d printing resonates with you um i mean do you feel like uh that technology is you know a whole new generation of of people who are now looking at how they can make their own toy from scratch or you know how learning how the the things are manufactured and all that i mean that's seems like what that is are you finding that yeah um you know as when i show 3d printers to events and stuff like that um the student every year it seems like the students that i'm teaching this to are more and more like up with the idea of what they can use this for um and you know the parents grad students or faculty staff that i'm sometimes working with um struggle wrapping their minds around it just a little bit more and it's because that you know the technology didn't exist 20 years ago whenever um you know they were looking at that stuff so like with toys and um just anything like being able to really click a few buttons and have something that you know would never have been an option before um makes it super easy um i you know i brought a prop with me today that like as a kid i wanted you know i wanted we can't talk about space without me venturing off into star wars for a minute so uh i wanted a lightsaber as a kid and um you know i'm getting the toy one from walmart that was just not not what i wanted um after the initial first day of using it and um getting a 3d printer i may you know i'm able to like print off a model of the actual one that i want and now i can you know i can paint it and how i'd be how i want it to be and all that stuff so um it makes it just really limitless almost with what you know someone can create when they have the technology and um the the one of the terms i use or phrases i use when i talk about my 3d printing workshops is um the only limit you have is your imagination and sometimes the size of the printer so that's the that's really what you're limited to so did you make models as a kid did you like go buy the revel and the the other um model kits and and make plastic models we had a i had a few model kits um growing up i was um i was more into like legos and that that sort of the model making world where um connects those sorts of things um i had a few uh my dad was real big into like you know old cars so i had a few model kits of like the older cars and stuff like that and i'm getting in i don't know if i ever completed one officially like all the way through i would get like 75 of the way done um and left it sitting in a box so um it was a big balsa the balsa wood kits that slot together those sorts of things which it's funny because now i can make those on our laser cutter in the library and kind of see the other side of that which is fun nice so the balsa wood kits these were airplanes or gliders or uh airplanes um or like they were like the skeleton figures of like the the t-rex like skeleton figures or any of those those were what i liked kind of building and um i've always kind of been a collector by nature as well so like now it's you know pop figures or um video game stuff or pokemon or any of those like collectible things um as a kid i was big with figures and stuff like that so nice well so i asked about models because this next film was is an amateur film and it's made by someone who was super excited about the space race and the upcoming space race so much so that they made their own stop-motion animated film called beyond the moon and uh this film um was purchased by friends of mine rick and megan prairlander who are archivists uh and megan has actually written a series of books about technology and aerospace technology and she narrates this because it didn't have a soundtrack but um this was basically the person who made it passed away and then the family member just sold it on ebay and um the prologuers tried to find all the other materials related to this but they only ended up with this reel so it's not complete but it's still awesome it still kind of tickles my brain with the whole idea of having a model well what do you do with a model well you make a movie with it you make your own space movie with it you have your own little space program with it so um this is beyond the moon so enjoy this me this is megan pralinger i'm an historian of space and technology i'm also co-principal of the pralinger film archives from which this film was taken this film by robert earl barnes is a testament to the strength and intensity of an amateur's love of space exploration welcome to beyond the moon i'll talk about what it is that barnes has built the history of the story that's told in this film and explain a bit about its social and technological context barnes was an amateur filmmaker from dayton ohio who lived from 1931 to 2009 after his death some of his films were sold by a friend of the family the pralinger archives acquired two of his reels on ebay and what we're watching is the second of the two reels the films were made by barnes between 1960 and 1962 the first reel not shown shows barnes himself working in his workshop building all the models and sets that he then utilizes to tell a story here in beyond the moon [Music] the rocket model that he's built is an atlas made by convair the model was made by the revell model company who are still in business making models one of the current products listed on their website is a model of the space shuttle discovery the atlas missile started out its life as an air force intercontinental ballistic missile the first icbm produced in the united states it was first flown in 1958 by the air force's strategic air command it was a workhorse of the cold war basically an 82-foot long missile originally armed with a nuclear warhead capable of traveling at 18 000 miles per hour for up to 5 500 miles however it was never utilized as a missile in 1960 the same year barnes started making this film it was adopted by nasa and the civil space program it was disarmed and turned into a rocket as a rocket it had a long and glamorous career it launched several missions of our first national human space flight program project mercury the missions of mercury were launched between 1957 and 1962 atlas joined the project mercury support structure in 1960 and carried john glenn on his historic first american orbit of earth in 1962. project mercury was the primary fuel for public excitement about space exploration during the years that barnes was making this film the media of 1960 and 61 were filled with images and stories of the mercury astronaut core their training their histories and the rockets and capsules they were going to fly in thomas wolfe's novel the right stuff dramatized the stories of the mercury astronauts in using a model atlas rocket to depict fictional interplanetary travel barnes was harnessing the stuff of his daily headlines and adapting it to a larger imagined story of future exploration beyond the moon tells an ambitious story forgive me for giving away the ending but this spacecraft is going to reach mars but in fact barnes is not telling a personal made-up story rather a very particular story that was publicly well known the idea that space exploration will proceed from earth toward a wheel-shaped space station then to the moon and then beyond the moon to mars is a classic story it originated with the german rocket engineer verner von braun in the 1950s and through his efforts to promote it as an inevitability it came to be known as the von braun paradigm between 1952 and 1954 collier's magazine ran a series of articles promoting space exploration that were driven by interviews with von braun and his close colleagues and followers the articles were lushly illustrated by several prominent space artists including fred freeman ralph klepp and chesley bonestell the film we're watching right now draws heavily on the imagery and the ideas about space exploration that were originally most clearly and succinctly expressed in both text and image in those articles we can't know whether or not barnes read the collier's articles but it doesn't matter von braun's paradigm of exploration expressed first through colliers and later through other media directly influenced the whole public image of what space exploration would look like and how it would be conducted [Music] now we see the separation of the spacecraft from its booster rockets the atlas rocket was built with a large launching booster rocket as well as two vernier rockets for guidance in real life the atlas would have shed its boosters after achieving escape velocity and then shed the vernier rockets once in orbit what remains is whatever's in the nose cone here the nose cone that barnes has built is a small interplanetary spacecraft the wheel-shaped space station is prominent in the collier's articles as it is here the idea behind this design is that a wheel could be propelled around such that its centrifugal force would generate an artificial gravity for astronauts to walk around in this design originated in the 1920s with another german rocket engineer jeremiah nordno but it was verner von braun who borrowed this idea from new ordnung and promoted and publicized this plan it turned out not to be practical the enormous expense of building a space station large enough to generate its own artificial gravity turned out to be well just practically impossible and if you want to know more about how space station design plans changed over time there's a book by howard mccurdy called the space station decision [Music] barnes has structured his film in a lovely meditative way notice now how much time we are spending getting to mars this is not a quick payoff action flick [Music] i particularly like the barnes interrupts the tedium of space flight with a brief glimpse of a flyby of a fiery comet coming up in just a minute don't blink [Music] in a minute mars will come into view in depicting mars barnes has opted for a retro classical image the red planet is shown to be streaked with marks on the landscape that look like the canals of old mars faces not really streaked with dark marks a fact that was well known by the early 1960s so why would barnes put them there well when mars was studied through telescopes in the 19th century a leading astronomer named giovanni schiaparelli of italy was the first one to believe that he saw canals on mars his preliminary idea was expanded upon to tremendous detail by an american astronomer percival lowell lowell studied the so-called canals at length and sketched them in great detail later in the 20th century improvements in telescope technology changed the scientific view of mars and lowells and schiaparelli's canals disappeared with the improved optics later astronomers replicated the optical errors that caused mars to appear streaked the canals of mars did not need to be real to profoundly influence the public imagination the canals were depicted in magazines and in literature and generated enormous speculation that they might be visible expressions of earthworks of an advanced civilization back to barnes's film itself this film is an important piece of evidence of our cultural history that's because it's a deep expression of one citizen's affection for space exploration barnes has studied and internalized the contemporary goings-on around him in planning for future space exploration he then turned those plans into his own vision and used them to make this film a work of amateur inspirational art thanks for listening and see you in the next movie and thanks to caitlin hammer for research on robert barnes [Music] that was really truly truly amazing um and it resonates with me i mean he did this as a as an adult um but i certainly attempted this as a kid you know i had tried to do stop-motion animation with my models and uh again the payoff wasn't there so i stopped doing it because you know you had to shoot the film then you had to take it get processed then you had to watch it and there wasn't this immediate gratification i guess that's you know we're talking a lot about my lack if there's not immediate gratification i'm not interested but um so did you ever venture into doing any videos or uh stop motion animation um not not too heavily growing up until i made a few small project videos as my time as an undergrad things i've worked on um i built my first year here at state we had our final project was to build a um build something using multi multi materials super broad which i love projects that are super broad but i built a you know an old vintage looking sled and i tried to take like a stop-motion animation of all that coming together the only issue is whenever you don't plan it out well enough then you weld pieces together before you took photos of them and it doesn't there's a weird jump cut that doesn't quite work so um but i've always i've always enjoyed you know the stop motion for stop motion for building things makes sense um you'd like to see that that step by step almost get pushed together it's a lot easier now yeah again you lucky kids you um and i should say that uh so megan prahlinger narrated this and she did an amazing book called another science fiction which she basically her and her husband have a library of all sorts of types of books and periodicals including a bunch of periodicals about the burgeoning aerospace industry and she was taken back by the beautiful advertisements by like lockheed aviation and all these these companies that were starting up uh that were creating rockets and and creating satellites and all this stuff and so she actually could put together kind of a coffee table book of all these amazing illustrations i don't know if the if the library has it or nc state libraries has it but it's it's worth checking out um and i see it's on sale it's on amazon for 20 bucks so it's worth it um uh it's beautiful just to look at you know a betrayal of like what the future is going to be like and this is what the aerospace industry is and and all that um the excitement of satellites uh but um i mean some of the people commented that the special effects were better than some feature film special effects of what we just saw for for an amateur film for stop motion that was that was great um especially for when you take into account when that was shot and yeah yeah it's funny to see um you could tell there were some creative camera angles to kind of hide some issues that someone that's trying to stop motion with a ramp and a long trailer it makes sense why you would hide that angle there and stuff like that so it's funny to see that he probably definitely tried and failed and then kind of re-shot certain aspects of it and yeah really though then even some people were saying like that pretty good quality stop-motion yeah um and you know chances are this is not his only take that he did multiple takes to get um to this point edited something together um you know the sadness of course is this is beautiful stuff that ended up being basically estate sales and so my film archivist person says hey if there's these amazing works that you're working on make arrangements with your family so they don't end up like split up on ebay because what happened was the collection got all split up the films were sold to different people and so you don't have a sense of their of their work um and you know there's a lot of these amazing auteurs animators who kind of did they're hobbyists but were very intense hobbyists and did some amazing things and there's this kind of realm between professional and amateur where there's all this beautiful stuff that was done so um you know so i'm sad that we don't get to see all of those films but that was pretty great nonetheless the part one that was mentioned of him building all the models and stuff that one hurts me not being able to see like the the work behind that side so yeah and you know it's more than likely that this isn't the only one that is out there that was great that was found because there's probably a lot more that were lost so right and and i should say having uh the ability to transfer a lot of home movies there's a whole generation of 80s uh star wars figures star wars being recreated uh in home movies um you know with some stop-motion with some you know just like hands moving the figures there's a lot of people making their own versions of uh star wars uh so um i've seen a few of those online where then you know a giant family pet cat comes rolling into the scene and yeah yeah that's really great um and you know so that's that you know that imagination it gets that thing percolating in kids heads and you know i certainly had a lot of that um lots of things percolating in my head um and that's probably why i'm where i'm at now because of all that that exciting excitement and creativity uh so somebody asked in the in the comments are there maker spaces for adults or is it just kids oh yeah they're um so our space at nc state is for um specifically nc state student faculty staff but there are definitely places um that have maker spaces in public libraries that you know and obviously there are so there's some private businesses that kind of have a maker space that you pay like a monthly subscription to to attend so um there are definitely adult you know focused centers for making and creating and stuff like that uh dir i think durham public library might have one which is more open to the public i'm not surprised i mean durham public library is awesome they're pretty good in a lot of regards um and i have gone to other uh public libraries across the country that where they had maker spaces um they did mostly programs for young people but they did allow for kind of adult hours [Laughter] yeah there's definitely you know a lot of the things you see are k-12 focus they're trying to get kids into doing all this but yeah most of the time yeah the late hours they're they're open i know other places you know san francisco is huge in the making community um austin texas has some um there's some private business ones in atlanta that i've seen um so yeah a lot of a lot of cool opportunities so um if somebody wanted to get a 3d printer are there resources for that i like where where to look because you know you can't trust amazon's reviews uh so that's very fair um if yeah if they're you know if you can't um find a makerspace or something like that and you're interested in getting in 3d printing your um there's tons of um there's tons of online forums whether that's in discord groups or reddit threads or anything like that that um talk about you know best beginner 3d printers um one thing to call out is 3d printers so i've gotten significantly more inexpensive to start off the first 3d printer i ever printed on was in the basement of po hall here on nc state's campus it was about the size of my refrigerator now and cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars and now um we just purchased some new machines for our makerspace that cost like 350 400 so not you know something you might be able to buy on a random friday in february but definitely something that's not out of the realm of possibility um and that that printer um it's a prusa mini i don't want to get too much of the pitch of that machine um because it might not be the right for you but um there are also we've bought printers off of amazon that are 120 bucks and for what they're worth they're they're great to print small figures and stuff like that if you're just getting into it yeah and what is the software the modeling software um are there i mean i'm sure there's lots of different things then i know about there's websites that have a bunch of libraries models like thingiverse and some things like thing burst or whatever yeah but um talk about the modeling software in just a little bit yeah so you know outside of those repositories that have them already done if you want to design your own stuff one of the ones i push people to is called autodesk tinkercad it's completely cloud-based it's simple designs i've taught it from my cousin who at the time was eight years old all the way up to some grandparents at our friends of the library's events that are you know 80 years old so everywhere in between um so if you've never done any 3d design and you want to get into it i would start with tinkercad before and it's free cloud-based so like before you have to fork over any money or do a trial subscription to a bigger platform like um fusion360 or solidworks or any of those i would try some of those free options and see is this something that i want to do nice excellent well justin thank you for uh joining us today and uh geeking out man i enjoyed it um yeah first first time here and um i've only watched one or two before so it was awesome to be a part of it from this side you know just talk about models and the the process of storytelling with them that's the big part of you know these models and outside of just owning something that's cool or shooting your rocket it's about that story that it tells yeah and then and it's there's what's happening externally but it's also what's happening internally like your brain and how you are dealing with three-dimensional things and and trying to resolve the physicality of it i think it builds on the outside but it builds on the inside too um especially for young minds seeing those simple concepts as they're much larger in the real world it's fantastic nice so thanks for having me so much skip oh yeah yeah thank you so much uh skip and justin that was really awesome to see um and everyone watching remember to visit avgeeks.com for more information and check out the compilations in the libraries and our next show will be coming up on march 25th at 3 p.m featuring a combination of films from skip's collection on the topic of florida so tune in then and until then you can watch previous av geeks events at the library shows through the library's website so thanks everyone have a great weekend you