Seth Reid, above, prepares his winning robot to compete in the vex robots competition during the Niagara County Community College Tech Wars. Right, Mike Lukasiewicz holds up his winning drafting design along with second-place finisher Courtney Flynn. The Cleveland Hill High School students helped the school finish second overall in the competition that featured 23 schools and more than 900 students. Cleveland Hill High School may be a fraction of the size of Grand Island or Clarence schools, but it stacks up against those larger districts in the tech room.

Cleve Hill flexed its technological muscle three weeks ago to place second out of 23 schools in the Niagara County Community College Tech Wars. In doing so, it knocked off larger schools such as Williamsville North, Clarence and Niagara-Wheatfield. Only Grand Island scored more points.

Not bad for one of the smallest schools in Erie County.

“We were ecstatic,” said technology teacher Steve Maranto. “Grand Island has four high school technology teachers and a lot of students. We don’t compete in every event, because we don’t have the resources for that. But the events we do compete in, we place.”

Cleveland Hill scored points in four of the 15 events, winning two of them. Grand Island placed in 11 events, winning five.

Leading the way for Cleve Hill were juniors Seth Reid and Mike Lukasiewicz. Reid won the vex robots competition, while Lukasiewicz took first in the 2D drafting drop-off event.

The vex robots competition features small radio-controlled robots picking up golf balls and placing them in a bucket. The robot that places the most golf balls in the bucket wins.

Reid finished third in the vex robots competition last year and tweaked his design to make it lighter and more accurate. He replaced the tires with tank treads and changed from a steel body to aluminum.

“What’s unique about the design is that it is very lightweight,” Maranto said. “It’s on tracks, so it’s very stable. He has a little turntable on it, so it rotates. It’s very accurate. He spent a lot of time honing this in.”

Reid said it took him six months of working on his robot every day to prepare it for the competition. Looking forward to competing again next year, he said he won’t change his design too drastically.

“I won’t change much to it, maybe just a little on the front,” he said. “This design worked really well.”

Reid was the only Cleveland Hill student to enter a robot in the competition, while Grand Island had six and Clarence had nine.

Lukasiewicz blew away the competition in the 2D drafting drop-off, which is a test to use computer-aided design to draw an object.

His technical drawing of a plain rack tool included 150 dimensions that measured down to one-thousandth of an inch.

“I think by far, he had the most complicated drawing out of all of them,” said Maranto, who added that at the high school level, anything greater than 60 dimensions is difficult. “That was what won it. And there isn’t a mistake on it in 150 dimensions.”

Lukasiewicz said he spent an hour a day for two months working on his drawing, which he found in his teacher’s college textbook.

“They had a bunch of different drawings to choose from,” he said. “We decided this was the coolest looking one.

“I love the technicality of it, that everything has to be precise down to one-thousandth of an inch. And if one thing is wrong, it messes up the whole piece.”

Cleveland Hill’s Courtney Flynn placed second in the competition with her drawing that included 80 dimensions.

Juniors Zak Thomas and Sharrieff Farneed-Muhammad placed second in the T-shirt design with their logo of a welder.

Seniors Alan Craft and Matt Lanning finished third in the musical instrument event with their creation of a new instrument that looked like a cross between a xylophone and a pipe organ. The boys constructed the instrument out of hundreds of feet of PVC pipe. By using paddles to bang on one end of the pipes, musical notes came out the other side. During the demonstration, the two played Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.”

The winning entry was a guitar.

“They had the most impressive musical instrument,” Maranto said. “The reason they came in third was that part of the criteria is a drawing of it. There was no way they were going to do a drawing of this instrument.

“What was so bad, the person who was grading it kept apologizing to me. He said ‘I’m so sorry, but I have to give them zeros for the engineering portion of it, but it was amazing.’”

In the middle school competition, seventh-grader Anthony Leggio finished second in the mouse trap car event, while seventh graders Terrell Brown and Michael Campbell took third in the balsa bridge event.

While finishing second was a huge accomplishment for Cleveland Hill, the students said they plan on coming back next year for the win.

“It’s impressive that all of us in this little school that no one ever knows about could do something so big,” Lukasiewicz said.

“We did really good, but I think we can do better,” Reid said. “Next year, we’re going for first.”

email: mkrueger@beenews.com