work, work, and more work

so it's coming down to crunch time on our project. we're giving a presentation on tuesday afternoon at the university, to people there, people from CRESP, and people from transtech, summarizing our work this summer. hopefully it'll spark interest in the project and motivate people to actually continue it after our departure. more importantly, other things need to be finished before then, which we've been working on for the past week.

we finally started the insulation tests, determining the conductivity of different materials that can be used for insulation in the ovens. but each test takes 4-5 hours to run, we can run two at a time, and we have 15 samples to test. ideally we'd like to test each sample twice. so we put in several long days in a row at the university running the experiements. two 12-hour days on thursday and friday, a 10-hour day saturday, and we also went and worked today. so much for our last weekend in senegal.

the weekend work schedule had to do with the construction of the mold. we found out thursday that transtech needs help to make the mold for the box. this we found out after visiting them unannounced, after they'd had our detailed drawings for 2 weeks. they probably didn't realize that francis and i are leaving on the 20th. the requested assistance from kassoum and samba (our university partners). they decided the best way to go about it was to move all the material to the university, so that they could use all the machines there, and have two transtech mold makers join them this weekend. francis supervised them yesterday and helped them scribe and cut all the pieces in the steel sheets. today they started welding the pieces together. hopefully it can come close to completion tomorrow. i, on the other hand, took pictures of the process and ran the insulation tests.

but two more long days and we'll be done. we've decided that after our presentation, we'll stop working. spend our last two days in senegal doing what we planned to do this weekend, visiting lac rose and hann park, and also some last minute shopping in dakar. the end of this internship hasn't been too relaxing, i think i need a vacation after this...