Kahl’s ingenuity earns him award

by Dave DeMars

news@thenewsleaders.com

Henry David Thoreau once said, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Brian Kahl, by his own admission, is a rule breaker.

“When I got a new set of Legos, I’d throw the instruction book away because I didn’t like to follow those directions and just build trucks,” Kahl said. “I like to go and combine the different kits together and just build crazy things like bulldozers and stuff.”

Yes, he has gotten the bulldozers to actually work and push dirt around. He outfitted the dozers with motors that came with some of the kits. He built tractors that moved like tractors and were complete to the power take-off shaft in the back of the tractor so he could run equipment behind the tractor. Everything worked – at least on the small scale. And that was accomplished before he finished eighth grade.

And it seems he has continued on this exciting path to this very day.

It should come as no surprise Kahl is on and around farm equipment a lot. After his grandfather retired from farming, and his father assumed the reins, a young Brian spent lots of time in the machine shed.

“I was definitely more interested in the machinery building and fixing,” he said.

Kahl is a senior at Sauk Rapids High School, a member of the robotics team. He works at Mimbach Fleet Supply part-time, a job that still allows him to tinker. The future looks bright for Kahl as he plans to attend college at North Dakota State University and study mechanical engineering. Nothing personal against the University of Minnesota, he said. It’s just one of his best friends attends NDSU, he has relatives who have attended NDSU, and NDSU has a good reputation and brand-new facilities with top-of-the-line equipment.

Recently he was honored at a school-board meeting for designing a small plastic piece of equipment that saved the school several thousands of dollars.

In the upper level of the high school is an open hallway with a railing around it. Part of the railing apparatus is a decorative tempered-glass panel about 24 inches square held in place by a kind of pressure fitting. When kids lean on the glass as they sometimes do, it causes the glass to slide down contacting the hard concrete lip and shattering the glass. Obviously, this is a hazard because someone could easily get cut or hurt in some other way if the problem were not resolved.

Enter Brian Kahl with a solution. As Kahl tells it, Principal Erich Martens called him into his office and challenged him to find a solution. Kahl took the challenge with a vague concept of what Martens wanted, got some additional measurements and how the glass was held in place and then he went home.

“I was just playing around on my computer trying to find out what looked best and I kind of got this design for it,” Kahl said. “I knew something had to go underneath it (the glass) and I didn’t want the glass to be sliding out, so I put that lip on it.”

When Kahl says “playing around on my computer,” he actually means his computer and the 3-D printer he uses to manufacture various items from a fine strand of nylon-type filament. The filament is actually thinner than the size of a human hair. In 2009, a printer might have cost $10,000, but Kahl said his home-based 3-D printer he bought a year or so ago was only about $400.

After four prototypes and a bit of trial and error in fitting the glass into a J-hook complete with some foam rubber to provide cushioning for the glass, Kahl was satisfied. The nylon/plastic prototype provided a cheap way to engineer and design the final product, which would be manufactured of metal since metal holds up better under the weight of the glass and the daily use in the school.

Designing and creating the prototypes and seeing they fit and perform properly saved the school district several thousands of dollars.

Lest one believe this is a singular occurrence, Kahl said he also designs and builds his own remote-control cars on his home 3-D printer. He’s designed parts for the windshield wipers on skidloader steers and plastic pieces to fit the carburetor of his motorcycle. The plastic piece for the carburetor saved him the cost of a new carb kit – about $900, he said.

“I made my first RC car and once I put it together, I realized there were some things I wanted to do a little bit differently, so I went and redesigned just about the whole thing, and now I’m working on the second version of the car,” Kahl said.

Kahl’s homebased printer is a bit small for the size of the car he was going to make, so he simply designed it in two sections and then connected them together with two rods he designed into the carcass of the car.

Kahl acknowledges he was lucky to grow up around the farm where he got to do a lot of tinkering and hands-on experiments. His natural curiosity drove him to try different ideas. Some worked and some didn’t, but the failures just taught him to think more carefully – and try again.

“One of the things that helped me to kind of advance my mechanical ideas,” Kahl said, “is the industrial-tech program and the metals class. It would be really nice if the school could expand on those classes, and maybe get a larger robotics program that is into just the mechanical side or the programming side.”

He said because everything is kind of mixed into a few classes, it gets tough to get everything a person wants to learn in a single trimester. He said he hopes it could be broken up into multiple sections with a kind of specialization in each area.

He also added more tours to various area companies that do the kind of technical design and manufacturing would be nice. He would also like to see more hands-on exposure perhaps with students working in a business after school or on weekends to earn some cash and credits toward graduation.

“Some kids aren’t exactly into the book work, and they are much more hands-on, so if they could get credit by actually doing stuff in the actual world, I think it would be very beneficial to some students,” Kahl said.

“We’ve taken a few tours and they are phenomenal,” he said. “We learn so much.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson is often misquoted as having said “if man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, he will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

It may be misquoted, but we get the message in the quote, and now we just need to watch and see how the world beats a path to the door of Brian Kahl, high-school wizard.