Laconia High School Project G.R.I.L.L. 2024 – Project Overview

Introduction

Adam: Becca, what did you think of the
Project Grill WiLL Cast?

Becca: I was very impressed. Some
impressive high school kids. They were very well-versed and they had a lot of
thoughts. I was bummed I didn’t have a mic for this one because there were so
many of them. We’ll have to have them back for round two, because there’s a
whole competition side of this as well. They do the grill design — creative but
also functional — and then they submit it and get to compete against other
teams doing the same thing. I think it’s one grill per school, and there’s a
bunch of local teams. In about a week, I think it’s always at Festival Foods in
Fond du Lac — all the grills set up and there’s the competition. People can go.
It’s like a giant brat fry.

Becca: I’ve known about Project Grill
for a while. Campbellsport started doing it when I was in high school, or just
after. This will shock everyone — I was not a Project Grill kid. I cut off half
a fingertip during sewing class, so they were not about to let me in the shop.
But it’s a really great program and it’s really grown. When I was in high
school, there were maybe three grills being built in Fond du Lac County. Now I
think it’s closer to a dozen. It really aligns with the WiLL mission 100% — get
people excited to design and build things.

Adam: For us to see how important that
mission is and how excited kids can get to make things — we’re going to help
them paint the grill and help them with a few things. It was a really cool WiLL
Cast.

Becca: I got the opportunity to walk
them through the shop and give them a tour. When they walked in, I said, I’m
not Adam Rupp, but I can hold my own. Their eyes lit up when they saw the paint
booth because they knew they needed some help with that. It was also great to
connect with another local teacher. They were singing his praises — Laconia’s
Mr. Felix. He’s the gold standard for shop teachers.

Getting Into the Trades

Adam: When did you guys get interested
in mechanical things, building things, and machines? Is that something you’ve
always been into?

Wyatt: I’ve been into just building
things with my hands and hands-on stuff and projects ever since I was a little
kid. I decided to do Project Grill this year, hoping to take that to the next
level and build something really cool that the community can enjoy.

Oliver: I’ve always worked with my
hands. I’ve been working with my dad since I was really young. I knew probably
in sixth grade what I was going to do when I was older.

Adam: What’s that?

Oliver: I’m going to be a plumber.

Evyn: I’ve always worked with my
hands. Usually woodworking around the shop with my father, building things all
the time. We built a gazebo over the summer, built our own three-car garage. My
dad’s always been in HVAC, so I’ve helped him with side jobs.

Adam: What do you want to do when you
graduate?

Evyn: I don’t really know yet, but
going into the trades for sure. This year I’m going to go into construction
because I’ve always wanted to build my own house.

Adam: What about you?

Wyatt: Right now I currently work at
Integrity Saw & Tool through the youth apprenticeship program. I go and
work there from 6:00 in the morning until 10:00, and then I go to school. Today
I went to Madison Tech for admissions day — had to figure out my schedule and
classes. I’m going to be going to Madison Area Technical College for business
management.

Project Grill: The Drum Set Concept

Adam: Tell me about Project Grill and
what that’s all about here in the Fond du Lac community. You guys are from
Rosendale?

Evyn: Project Grill has been a pretty
cool project for our school and our shop program. It’s a pretty big deal to us.
We definitely take it seriously. Last year we built a really cool pizza oven
trailer. I think what we have going this year could definitely top it.

Adam: Full trailer? Wheels, tires,
enclosure, working pizza oven?

Evyn: Yep, the whole works. It’s a
brick oven — it gets really hot in there and it cooks a pizza in like two
minutes. I think it’s called Alpha Ovens. It runs off wood — we light wood on
fire and it sits in there and gets really hot. And we made the trailer around
it. That was last year.

Adam: What did you guys do this year?

Evyn: This year, in my opinion, we
topped it. We went with a drum set grill idea. We partnered with Festival
Foods, and we built a drum set for them that you’ll be able to see at all the
brat fries.

Adam: So the basic idea behind Project
Grill is to come up with a cool idea for an actual functional grill, and then
you guys work on the design and partner with local manufacturers to bring it to
life.

Oliver: The coolest thing about
Project Grill is going through these different local places. If you do Project
Grill and go into an interview with any of these places, you’re pretty much
hired. It’s a great way to get around and find out what you want to do.

Adam: Do you get to see the full
engineering process? Is there CAD involved?

Evyn: We do all that. We have a couple
guys on the team that have done a lot of the designing and drafting. Two people
in particular are pretty good with SolidWorks and have made actual drawings
that we’ve branched our ideas off of. We also use Google SketchUp for
architectural drawings and outdoor modeling. We used that to communicate what
we were actually going to build. I went into it for about a week, sent it over
to our guys at Festival, they okayed it and said it looked great, and then we
did our budget and started putting metal together.

The Design Process: Rocket Stoves to Drum Sets

Adam: Rewind to the first meeting. Who
was there? What did that brainstorming session look like?

Wyatt: We started off with like three
ideas before we got to our final one. We spent a lot of time over the course of
the school year figuring out ideas and planning. We really didn’t get started
with the grill we’re on now until about end of January, early February.

Wyatt: We started out wanting to do a
mass production project. We looked at some old ideas — we made the Happy Camper
Grills before, and those were definitely a hit. We were thinking about doing it
better. We were looking at doing rocket stoves. We made a bunch of prototypes
and even tried cooking with them to see how long it would take to boil water.

Adam: What made it a rocket stove?

Wyatt: It’s an L-shaped grill, for
lack of a better term, made of square tubing, and then there’s a third shaft
that feeds in. So it’s a self-feeding wood stove — you put wood into it and
it’ll burn. You set your pan on the top of the L shape. A lot of people make
them out of 4×4 square tube steel. We tried doing 2×2 to be more
cost-effective, and it just would not work.

Adam: Was there a customer? Was
somebody giving you requirements?

Wyatt: We kind of found something we
liked, and we were going to make about 25 and sell them to the public. But
after the rocket stoves, we decided that was not the best idea. Then we were
going to do a smoker trailer, since we did a trailer the year before. We ended
up not going that route either.

Evyn: We got on to the drum set idea
because we met with Mike from Festival, and he got us rolling on how the owner
of Festival is a huge rock-and-roll fan. Originally we were planning on making
a guitar cooktop to grill out on, and we also had a drum set idea. We pursued
the drum set, and here we are. We knew our customer.

Building the Grill

Adam: What kind of parts is this made
up of?

Evyn: The frame’s 2×2 tube steel. Our
bass drums are built out of gauge sheet metal. And then there’s 1-inch round
tube. The only thing we really outsourced is the three standup drums on the
grill, which are technically your cooking grills — we outsourced those for
cost-effective reasons and time. Everything else we made in-house.

Adam: How many different suppliers did
you have?

Evyn: Mr. Felix was the buyer and the
purchasing department. We got most of the metal from Elro. Our biggest thing
was, we wanted to make one for Festival because they always have somebody make
one for them, but it never lasts that long and they always have to bring out
the Weber grills. So we decided to use what they use and what everybody can
use. We wanted it to last forever. We built the grill around the Weber grills —
three Weber grills that are kind of like a drum set.

Wyatt: Almost anyone can use a Weber
grill. They’re not very sophisticated. We could have made our own grills
because we have the capabilities, but we figured why reinvent the wheel if it’s
already proven.

The Design in Detail

Evyn: There’s two bass drums in the
front, all sitting on a triangle-shaped frame with three caster wheels. We went
with three wheels versus four to avoid rocking on uneven ground. We have custom
caster mounts so it sits lower to the ground and isn’t a trip hazard. The bass
drums we completely made from scratch — rolled the sheet metal in-house. Inside
the bass drums, you can keep three to four bags of charcoal in each drum, plus
your lighter fluid.

Adam: How do you keep the seams
together on the bass drum?

Evyn: We rolled it tight, Bryce welded
the backside of the drum, left a little room for an overlap, and then trimmed
it flush. On those, there’s magnet doors that go on the front. You can keep all
your storage in there and no one will ever know. There’s actual bass drum rings
on it, so it looks really realistic. Behind that, there’s your three standup
grills wrapped in stainless. Everything is kind of black and chrome —
rock-and-roll themed.

Evyn: On the front, there’s two
cymbals with stainless steel tops to put your cooking trays on or spatulas. We
did stainless on those so it still meets food quality standards. The stands for
the snare drums — what you’re cooking with on the Weber grills — come up
through a pole with three things that branch off. That was probably what took
us the longest, about three weeks of measuring and fitting all the little
parts.

The Shop & Equipment

Adam: What does your shop look like?
What kind of equipment do you have?

Wyatt: One of our more sophisticated
things that we’ve used a lot more than we ever thought is a CNC plasma table.
That’s been a huge help in being able to build a more sophisticated grill. But
most of it’s just like hand tools — a band saw, stuff like that. We have an end
mill too. A lot of welding was involved in the grill. We have a really good
welder on our team — his name is Bryce. He’s been doing some TIG stuff on the
bass drums. We had to TIG some magnets on because it’s a cool thing we added —
the doors are magnets, so you can’t really tell it’s a door because it magnets
straight to the drum. Almost a hidden door.

Should Every Student Take a Shop Class?

Adam: Do you guys see kids your age
getting more interested in hands-on things, or are you the exception to the
rule?

Oliver: I think it’s sad to say, but
people are still trying to push people away from it. But I can tell by most the
kids in my class — they don’t really like school, but they love going down to
the shop. A lot more people are going into the trades, surprisingly, even
though they’re still pushing people out of it. It’s grown a lot.

Evyn: They used to really push more
sitting at a desk, less hands-on things. It depends on the student’s background
and what they’re interested in. But at our school, a lot of the kids really go
there for the shop and the hands-on learning. Kids really enjoy that. And as
you get older and out of high school, people are starting to realize — this is
where the jobs are at.

Adam: It’s very encouraging to see
people like you guys that are passionate about it. You can combine it with
drafting skills and computer skills and electronics, and there’s this overlap
of technology and mechanical skill sets that makes it a lot more fun.

Evyn: One thing — Mr. Felix has helped
us a lot. He knows literally everything. But I can tell by going to other
shops, most teachers aren’t that good. We’re losing a lot of that too. A lot
less schools are getting good shop teachers. You can’t really teach many kids
to love the shop if you don’t have a good shop teacher. I really think it all
starts there.

Adam: It’s also on manufacturers and
construction companies to make their company exciting to work at. I think a lot
of manufacturing companies maybe haven’t done that. To appeal to the next
generation or two, you need a great place to work so that the people who do
want to work with their hands can come to work and get excited.

Advice: Try Everything

Adam: If you were writing school
policy or even public policy, what would you do to encourage more kids to go
down this road?

Oliver: I think everyone should take a
shop class. There are certain people where it would never work, but everybody
should try everything. We still have to take English class, so I think
everybody should try at least one semester of shop, just to see if they like
it.

Wyatt: You have to try everything to
really understand what you want and don’t want. Maybe you’re going to go to
school and be an accountant, but maybe you really wanted to be a plumber and
you just never took a shop class to realize what you actually want. Everybody
should get a baseline on what the tools are and how to use them. Build one
simple project.

Evyn: In the shop, there are a lot of
things in life that you learn that can definitely be useful. Especially if
you’re going to own a house someday — putting on new face plates on an outlet
or a light switch, what’s dangerous and what’s not. You save yourself a lot of
money in the future. When you take a shop class with Mr. Felix, he teaches you
how to set a toilet, how to put an outlet in. Most people don’t know how to do
that if they don’t take the shop class.

Adam: What about companies — what can
manufacturing companies do?

Oliver: Just exposing people to what
you actually do. This year I went on a tour at Fond du Lac High School with my
classmates, and there was only a handful of companies there. Then there’s all
these colleges that take up the whole gym, and the actual companies only get
one little room. There should be more people pushing what they do.

Adam: We have a lot of people come
through our shop, and it forces us to elevate our game. We need to be
customer-ready. It’s like going to a restaurant where you can see into the
kitchen — they’re going to make better food. Factories and shops should be open
to having kids through and customers through. More exposure at the school level
and the company level is probably good for everybody.

Closing

Evyn: I really want to say a big
thanks to Mr. Felix and everyone at the school, and Midstates Aluminum and
Festival and Mech and Wisconsin Lighting Lab.

Adam: There’s a lot of really good
companies in the area. If there’s a bright spot in the manufacturing sector,
it’s definitely in southeastern Wisconsin. It’s encouraging that you guys are
into this stuff and more kids are getting into it, because it’s really
important for the economy as a whole.

Wyatt: All these trades — they’re
always going to need people there. And things do not build themselves.

Adam: Even on the automation side,
such a huge percentage of stuff is already automated — high-volume
manufacturing with very little variation. The low-to-medium volume, the fun
stuff — people are going to have to do that for a long time. We definitely need
more people interested in it.

Adam: Cool. Guys, thanks for coming
on.

Evyn: Thanks for having us.