The Kenendy Chopper Class is pleased to welcome its newest sponsor: Flyrite Choppers.

Flyrite Choppers has donated a sportster frame to the class for use on a future bike, and we would like to thank them for the donation. We’ve also added their plaque to the list of sponsors at the bottom of this page.

The 2010 Kennedy Chopper Class Open House is over, but it was a pretty good time for all of those who came. Below are some pictures that I took while I was there, it was tough to get too many good ones while staying out of everyones’ way! Over the next week or so I’ll be collecting as many pieces of information as I can from the Open House for anyone who missed it. So, if you have anything (including pictures), don’t hesitate to send it to me at preston(at)dvorakdesigns.com (replace (at) with @).

The Kennedy Chopper Class will be holding an open house in their machine shop at Kennedy High School from 3-6pm this Friday (May 15, 2010).

At the open house you’ll be able to see several of the bikes that have been completed by the students, as well as the bikes that are currently in the works. You’ll also have the opportunity to walk around the machine shop to see what else the students are working on. The teacher, Kevin Baas, along with some of the current students, will be there to answer questions as well. In addition to the bikes made by the Kennedy Chopper Class, other bike enthusiast will be there with their rides as well, ensuring there will be plenty of bikes to look at and people to talk to.

The open house will take place inside of the machine shop at Kennedy High School, which is located around the back of the school. Please refer to the map below for help finding the entrance to the machine shop.

Map provided by Google Maps.

I’ve finally finished adding all of the information I had for the Kennedy Chopper Class projects. You can take a look at them by clicking the Projects link at the top of the page. From now on I’ll be meeting with Mr. Baas around April/May of every year to gather information on that school year’s bikes, that way the website stays pretty current with information. I’ll also be adding older information as it’s given to me, or as I find it. If you have any issues with any of the pages, let me know so I can get them fixed!

Finally, the performance tweaks for the website are all but done, so it should be noticeably faster now. As you also probably noticed, I’ve removed the intro video in the header for the time being. I’m going to be exploring ways to add it again without it having a negative impact on the website performance.

I just wanted to make a quick post to let everyone know that over the next couple weeks I’ll be making several updates to the website again. This includes performance tweaks, so the website should run and load a lot faster. I’ve already implemented several things that affect the load times, so hopefully most people notice it’s a little faster. Over the next several days I’ll be finishing all of the performance tweaks, so hopefully by this weekend the website will be loading much faster than it has been.

I’ve also finally got most of the information I need to make all of the project pages up to and through the 2009/2010 school year. These will all be added after the performance tweaks are done. Once the pages are added they’ll contain pictures of the bikes, awards the bikes won each year, links or citations for any magazines/online articles the bikes were shown in, and any other relevant information I found. I’ll also be updating the About page to reflect magazines/online articles the Chopper Class, Mr. Baas, or the bikes were shown in.

Finally, I’ll also be looking into why the Sponsor list at the bottom of the page doesn’t work in some browsers again, and either fix or replace it so it works for everyone.

Just as a warning, during the next couple weeks you may see things on the site that look out of place, or misaligned. This is an unfortunate side affect of the work I’m doing, and the fact that most browsers display things in different ways. If you do see something that doesn’t look right, give it a day and chances are it will be back to normal. If you happen to see something that’s consistently wrong or misplaced, feel free to leave a comment on this post and I’ll get to fixing as soon as possible.