Concrete Ahoy! : Engineering: Using the same ingredients that go into skyscrapers and sidewalks, UCLA students build a canoe that floats.

UCLA’s entry didn’t win the recent concrete canoe race sponsored by the Pacific Southwest chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

That honor went to Northern Arizona University. But UCLA’s vessel didn’t sink like a stone as USC’s did, and it didn’t break in half--the fate of Loyola Marymount’s concrete craft.

In fact, the dozen students who built Bladerunner, as they called their blue-and-gold boat, were exceedingly happy when they came in second to Cal State Fullerton for overall concrete canoe excellence.

For what?

Why would anyone want to build something designed to float out of a material notorious for its tendency to sink? There are lots of reasons, say more than a dozen UCLA student engineers who spent months designing and building a better concrete canoe.

Concrete is an important building material, they point out, one that may well be a staple of their professional lives.

“Working with concrete, you learn a lot about its behavior,” says Oladipo Onipede, a 28-year-old graduate student. You learn, for instance, that less water in the recipe helps control shrinkage cracks and translates into greater strength, but it also makes the concrete harder to work with. A trade-off, as the students call it.

The students began preparing for the April competition during their winter break. Their initial plan was to build an innovative design developed at an Australian university.

“We poured flat panels of concrete that would be assembled similar to the way in which the Japanese art of origami folds a flat piece of paper into an object,” explains Sheila Aberin, 22, one of the coordinators of the project.

There was one problem. The origami design didn’t work. When the student engineers began to lift the panels into place, the concrete cracked and spalled--broke off in layers parallel to the surface. But the team was unsinkable. Only a few weeks before launch time, they started over, racing to finish a canoe with a more conventional design.

According to their final report, the students invested 230 hours in their 14-foot-long, 186-pound canoe. They got no academic credit for the project, but they all agree that they learned a lot. The failures, they insist cheerfully, were more instructive than the successes.

Several of the participants said the hands-on experience was especially welcome because UCLA’s civil engineering department is so theoretically oriented. “At UCLA all we study is books,” said one of the would-be engineers. “We never get to build anything. This was a rare opportunity.”

To pay for their vessel, the students made up books of their resumes and offered them to engineering firms for $50 each. To the students’ surprise, they sold 23 sets of resumes, not only raising money but bringing themselves to the attention of prospective employers. To prepare themselves to paddle their own concrete canoe, the students began weight training and two-mile runs.

Their efforts paid off April 6 at the Newport Dunes in Newport Beach. Bladerunner was launched and stayed afloat.

“We were really high it worked,” says co-coordinator Allan Sheth, 24.

On the downside, it didn’t work all that well. “To tell you the truth, ours didn’t go straight,” confides Veronica Iskandar, 21.

But wait until next year, when UCLA will host the regional competition.

The students already have begun sketching improved designs on envelopes and scribbling better concrete recipes. They want to pare that old devil, concrete density, down from 100 pounds per cubic foot to 60 pounds per cubic foot. That would make the canoe lighter but, of course, also less strong.

“It gets tricky,” says Onipede, happily calculating the costs and trade-offs.