The student in the orange flight suit, with help from others, carries "The Final Countdown" to the scales to be weighed. You can see the space shuttle SRB painted on the rear of the canoe.
Students put the first layer of concrete on the mold that forms the inside of the canoe.
Students add steel or carbon-fiber mesh to reinforce the concrete and make it less brittle.
Students inlay our college name and canoe number in the mold.
When sitting and rowing on concrete, you want a nice, smooth finish!
Because we’re working in wet conditions, using air tools is much safer than electrical grinders.
The canoe is graded at competition for the aesthetics of the final product.
In the civil engineering lab, students use organic and environmentally safe stains to give the canoe color.
Each canoe is measured to make sure it meets the criteria for the design specified by the competition rules. Every day our faculty helps support our student in their quest for knowledge.
The student in the orange flight suit, with help from others, carries “The Final Countdown” to the scales to be weighed. You can see the space shuttle SRB painted on the rear of the canoe.
Co-ed sprints are part of the paddling race that occurs every year.
In between races students have fun on the water.
In 1997, we were number “1” in the nation, beating over 250 schools. We won!!!!!
Summer 2010, we finished 9th out of 300 schools in North America. Even Pete the Panther came to root the team on! School spirit!
Who would’ve guessed? Concrete floats! Civil engineering students prove that and more when they join in designing, building and testing a concrete canoe each year. This is a culminating project for many and a true collaborative effort that’s so “real world.” It’s all hands-on when they coat the frame in concrete, reinforce it, polish, sand, stain it and apply the canoe’s name. Names like “Panthera,” “Black Racer” and “Sea Esta.” The university has a tradition going back almost 20 years of delivering some of the most excellent concrete canoes into competition. The Florida Tech concrete canoe finished first in the American Society for Civil Engineers national conference in 1997 and third in 2000. The “Final Countdown” came in first place in the 2011 regional competition, earning the right to go to nationals in Evansville, Ind. They don’t just make a quality product; the team rowers “oar” dynamite contenders, in the men’s and women’s races and coed sprints, too!
