A dear friend of ours (Mark Rober) is a youtube sensation. We just adore him & how he can make science absolutely entertaining & fascinating. He has made my boys fall in love with engineering & chemistry by watching his videos. He goes to church with us & he was even Bladen's teacher for a while. Bladen loves his son. They are really great friends.
My kids have been itching to be in one of his videos forever. When Mark found out we were moving to AL, he decided it was time to put the Potter crew in a science video. The kids were DYING. They were SO excited.
So Mark did a video with VW who was sponsoring a car in a big race here in America. The car had to be powered by battery (no gas) & Mark had to figure out a way to charge up the battery without electricity. The full video show all 3 ways he tried to power it up. My kids were in the middle segment dealing with the zipline. They used a zipline to create electricity that went directly into the battery. The kids spent the entire afternoon riding a zipline. How fun is that?
If you want to watch the video, you can find it here:
After spending the morning & afternoon filming the video, we took off to head home. The video was in Santa Cruz so it was about an hour away. And of course the minute we turned the first corner to head for home, the power steering went out, then the A/C, then the engine. . . the entire van just shut down. Luckily we were near an Auto Zone & were able to get at least into the parking lot. Our serpentine belt was off the car motor completely. Nothing was working. We pushed the car to the nearest mechanic. He was closing shop in 10 minutes, but said he would look at it.
A bolt that held the serpentine belt literally had broken in half. The screw part of the bolt was still screwed into the motor & the piece the belt wraps around was loose on the bottom of the engine floor. They were able to get the wrap piece easily, but they couldn't figure out how to get the screw out of the motor. It was in a place that was impossible to reach & it was broken right where it went inside the motor.
That sweet mechanic literally stayed over an hour after his closing time & used a welder, a hammer & chisel, & other mechanisms to figure out how to unscrew it from an unreachable location. We are SO very grateful for that man. Not knowing if he'd be able to do it, we were calling rental car places, hotels, & all sorts of things we "needed" if we couldn't get it fixed. EVERYTHING was closed, the hotels were full, we were literally stranded in Santa Cruz. We are SO grateful for that wonderful mechanice who figured it out. He was our guardian angel that day.
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