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.

Welcome to the new website! I went through a lot of feedback and tried to figure out what worked with the last website, and what didn’t. For starters this one is built on a blogging platform, making it much more user friendly for posting news, and it also lets everyone post comments on news articles (a big improvement over the last website). You can also click on the “RSS Subscribe” button and follow this site in your favorite RSS reader.

The other big thing was handling all of the sponsors. So at the bottom of this site are two lines of plates that you can scroll through using the arrows on either side of the list. Each plate has a sponsor on it, and links to their website, if they have one. If you or your company is listed there and an error was made, please let me know and I will fix it quickly.

I also added a “Share This” toolbar to the bottom of every page, making it easier to share this site and any of the posts you’re reading without needing to copy the URL and open up a different website, so be sure to give it a try!

One thing that’s still being worked on is all of the Project pages. My goal is to make them much more informative than they were before, and include awards each project won, events the project has been at, specs for the project, and really any other relevant information I can think of. As most of you know, the Chopper Class will be attending the Donnie Smith Bike Show this month, and Kevin Baas has recently had knee surgery. Due to these factors you can expect these pages to be completed sometime towards the end of April, or the beginning of May. Until then, if you have anything information about the projects, email it to preston@dvorakdesigns.com. Another thing I’ll be adding sometime in the future is the ability to buy T-Shirts directly off of the support page, as well as donate through PayPal. These are things I need Mr. Baas’ help with, just to make sure the moving of money is well coordinated and that he’s able to send out T-Shirts without any trouble, so be on the look out for that as well.

Two minor problems I’m aware of right away after uploading the site are the sponsor scrolling doesn’t seem to work on the home page in all browsers, but it should work if you go to any of the other pages on the site; and the Blogroll needs to be updated with relevant blogs, which I will be working on over the next few days.

Please post any feedback you have in the comments here, or contact Preston Dvorak!

We started making parts with our new 3 axis CNC Mill from Milltronics. What a great Mill and what an even greater experience for the kids in the class!