Josh's Site

Hi I’m Josh Huesman and this is my home page!   I am a Junior Mechanical Engineering student at North Dakota State University and grew up near Detroit Lakes, MN.  I recently started back up with school again this fall after taking last spring off for an internship at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and a summer internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.  I am currently dedicating my life to the NASA Robotic Mining Competition robot that my school’s team is building.  A bit of this project and others are shared on this site, which is dedicated solely to projects I’ve done over the years.

To see these projects, you can scroll through a couple below, or you can see a full list of the projects I’ve uploaded under the “Projects” link on the main menu of this page.   A copy of my resume is available to any employers through the main menu which you are free to view or download.  Thanks for looking and I hope you like what you see!

The Pulse Jet Boat was a project that my brother and I both worked on immediately after I finished the Make-A-Wish tree house in the summer of 2016.  Basically, we had an old fishing boat in our yard that nobody was using, so we thought “What if we strapped a loud, red-hot, dangerous pulse jet onto it to power it and take it for a spin?”.  You know, like you do.

The design for the engine was inspired by Bruce Simpson’s Enhanced Lockwood Pulse Jet and had around 55lb of thrust.  Jake and I were already familiar with this pulse jet from crazy videos featuring them on Colin Furz’s channel on YouTube.

I was already looking for an excuse to learn SolidWorks, so I got a copy of it and made a model of the pulse jet that we wanted to build, then made some prints for the flat patterns for the stainless sheet that it was eventually going to become the finished product.

We had a local shop provide and cut the metal, but we rolled the cones and welded everything together after that.  We also did all the plumbing and fuel injection stuff.  Of course we also built a janky mount for the jet and blast shield that was intended to save us from any explosions had something gone wrong.

We tried starting the engine that night.  Also, partially melted a leaf blower.

Finally, we were ready for testing…

… and terrifying our sister and our dog.  Also, notice I got smart and made a new nozzle for the leaf blower so I didn’t have to stand in the blast zone while starting the jet.

Our maiden voyage finally occurred a bit later, followed by our second and last trip on the pulse jet boat by the island.  We were… umm… discouraged from continuing our escapades by fellow Rochert residents because every time we ran the pulse jet it sounded like World War 3 was starting.  Even with the premature ending, it was a fun project.  If you’re interesting more in pulse jets there are lots of little forums and websites dedicated to the topic, so pulse jets are pretty easy to gather useful info on.

One day when I have time in my life again (I’m in denial, OK?), I really want to build a bigger version of this pulse jet with a couple hundred pounds of thrust and built an ice cart to put it on and tear across the lake in it in the winter when there aren’t people around to annoy with the soul-shaking noise.  That would be much cooler than a boat anyway (see what I did there?).  Alright sorry, I’m done now.

In the summer of 2016 after my freshman year of college, I got the chance to design and build a tree house for a Make-A-Wish kid in near my hometown in Rochert, MN.  It was a very unique and fun project to have, simultaneously being able to grant a kid’s wish and build something cool at the same time.

With the only design constraint being that the tree house needed to be painted blue, I started by brainstorming some different designs, picked my favorite and then made a CAD model of it, shown below.

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I was very excited to start building this thing since I hadn’t built a tree house since I was kid.  I was especially looking forward to building the arched roof, since in all the three years I worked construction, I never got the chance to try building one.

Process I used for making the rafters.

I made the common rafters using a pattern I made to cut out plywood pieces and then laminated and sanded them into the final product.  These were easy and I had done similar things in other projects previously.

The jack rafters were kind of the same story, but they also had beveled cuts where they attached to the valley rafters.  Normally this is an easy thing on straight jack rafters since you can just use a speed square to find the angles you need or do some quick trig.  But, on a curved roof, the pitch is different at each height and the curvature makes it difficult to mark cut locations, so I came up with a really quick and easy way of finding the exact location of the cut and the exact angle to cut it at.  I might add the process to this page later, since it made a normally difficult task really easy.

The last part of the framing for the roof was cutting the valley rafters.  These were also interesting to figure out.  They obviously aren’t a circular shape since they are formed by the intersection of the circular profile of the roof intersecting an angled plane, which is a conic section.  So the easiest I came up with to create this elliptical shape was to first make a grid on a sheet of plywood and trace the profile of half the common rafter on it.  Then, for each y-position on the grid, measure the x-position where the common rafter profile intersects it and divide that number by cos45.  Finally, mark that as a new x-coordinate for that y-position.  By doing this for a large number of y-positions, a bunch of points are generated which together outline the geometry of the valley rafter.  So I just connected the dots, cut out a bunch of these shapes, laminated them together, and finally sanded them to get the final product.

I didn’t take enough pictures, but you can see a bit of the process I went through below, and how well everything meets up together in the valleys.  I was really happy with how that all turned out.

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Most of the other things I did when building this thing was about as standard as a person can do when building in a tree and working around the challenges that come with that.  In addition to building the tree house, I also put together a telescope and zip-line for the wish kid to play with.  So, enjoy some pictures of the finished wish project.

Back in 2012, when I was fifteen I found a 1989 Ford Festiva on Craigslist for $100.  My brother already had an obnoxious blue one, so I decided to take it a step further and restore this one, but make it green.  I spent the next few months fixing up the car every day after school to finish it before I got my license on my sixteenth birthday.

Here is the car when my dad and I towed it home from the middle of nowhere in North Dakota.  Just look at this soon to be beauty.

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Since we got the car in the middle the night, we couldn’t really see what we were getting until the next morning.  We found a motor with two functioning cylinders, brakes with rusted lines, a mouse-eaten interior, lots of rust holes in the exterior, and many other fun things.  Lucky for me, my dad is a mechanic, so he was able to help me out with lots of stuff when I was working on the car and I learned a ton the whole way through the project.

As you can see, the car was completely gutted and I took over my dad’s garage for a few months.

The garage also turned into a paint booth for a week or so.

Finally I put back together the world’s greenest jigsaw puzzle.

The car lasted me all through high school and I’m still driving it to this day.

My plan is to make it last until I’m a couple years into my career and then have the world’s most outrageous trade-in when I get my first Tesla.

Here is the green machine out and about.

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Over the years I’ve done many home renovations and improvements for family and for people in my community.  This started in early middle school, and accelerated after I started working in carpentry in high school.

During my senior year of high school I did full-time PSEO at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, but when I wasn’t in school, I was remodeling and adding onto my parent’s cabin to turn it into a full-time residence.

The project lasted from the fall of 2014 to early summer 2015.  It took a while since I was driving three hours every day for school and was taking 16 credits a semester.  So I really could only work on the house at night and on the weekends.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures before we started the remodel, but I have some from somewhat early on when the place was gutted and had windows installed.

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Basically, the place had another level added onto the front that became the master bedroom.  The basement had drain tile and a french drain installed to keep it from flooding, and then the basement was turned into another bedroom.   Dormers were added to the loft to give more headroom and it was turned into a reading area. The kitchen, bathroom and living rooms were completely redone and the exterior was much improved.  My parents both take a lot of attention to detail, so there are a lot of really neat features in the house that most places wouldn’t have.

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I’m really bad about taking pictures, so the ones above are when it wasn’t quite finished.  I’ll take more pictures of the house so you can see the final product, and all of the rooms that aren’t pictured here currently.