My son Cameron from BSA Troop 28 in Meridian recently completed his Eagle Scout Project by relocating and/or repairing most of the nature trail signs for Lucky Peak Nursery.
Lucky Peak Nursery is part of the U.S. Forest Service where they harvest and preserve seeds, then grow trees and shrubs to replant after disasters.
The nursery keeps a nature trail of native plants and some invasive plant species for school groups to explore during their tour of the facility.
There are 34 signs that mark these plants but over time the plants tend to migrate away from them.
For his Eagle Scout Project, Cameron helped figure out where the plants had migrated, marked where the signs needed to go, and then organized a group of ~15 volunteers to reset the signs near their respective plants. As part of this effort, Cameron also noticed that 5 of the signs were either missing or were falling apart.
I suggested to him to talk to Darren Willey and see if DFS would help out by making 5 replacement signs using some high-density 3 layered polyethylene plastic and the CNC router table.
With this material, the numbers do not need to be painted onto the signs. Because the plastic consists of different colored layers (in this case, the top layer being blue and the bottom layer white) our machines and programs can precisely remove the top layer to expose the white plastic beneath, and thus create a raised blue number.
After speaking with Cameron, Darren agreed and said DFS would be glad to help.
With the assistance of Adam George, who designed the signs based on info provided by Cameron; Cory Woody who developed the CNC programs; and Lucas Busby and Wally Teixeira who had Cameron help run the signs on the CNC and clean them up (which Cameron thought was really cool), the signs were complete.
They are now all installed, look really good, and will last much longer than the ones they replaced.
I am personally very grateful to work with a lot of extremely good, genuine people at DFS/CPS.
This was a small gesture, but had a big impact.