On June 30th, I took a trip with my friend Beya and our youngest boys to Clear Creek Reservoir to paddleboard. The wind was strong. The water was murky. The sun was hot. We managed to make it around the reeds but no further. When I emerged from the water, I found a horrifying sight. My paddleboard fin had come out of its socket and had fallen to the reservoir floor. The boys searched the mud for the fin, but it was nowhere to be found. No worries, I thought. That's what Amazon is for. I searched the internet as deeply as the boys searched the river. Nope. Not for this paddleboard. This fin is particular. It has little notches to anchor the fin (not so well if you don't slide the lock all the way through). I called CA Paddleboards, the company who made our board, to see if they had replacement fins—the kind with notches in the bottom for extra hold. They haven't made that kind of fin in years. Someone in Utah had just lost his, and they'd had to share the disappointing news with him.
My husband, Erik, wasn't pleased about the loss. He teased that maybe I could go to the Maker Lab at NAU to get a new one printed. That seemed impossible to me. Farfetched to him. But not to be deterred, I visited the Maker Lab website. I learned Tinkercad. I tinkered and prototyped and screwed up measurements. Zoe kept telling me I needed calipers. Max, mentioned only when I had almost finished drawing the fin, having bruised my head hitting it against the wall of three-dimensional design, “Oh yeah. I learned Tinkercad in science last year. You’re doing it wrong.�  I made one fin. It was too small. I made another fin. The notches were in the wrong place. I made another fin. The base was too wide. But five prototypes later, I finally have a fin that slides into the notch inside the paddleboard fin-holding device. Now, summer is mostly over, but perhaps, it will warm up enough for us to make it to the water one more time before winter.
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On June 30th, I took a trip with my friend Beya and our youngest boys to Clear Creek Reservoir to paddleboard. The wind was strong. The water was murky. The sun was hot. We managed to make it … Read moreNicole's Impossibly Possible Ideas: Impossible College
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