During my sophmore year of highschool (2020), I pruchased a set of Yamaha Marching Tenors, a common instrument of the drumline. When wearing these drums, I felt very uncomfortable playing them, as the drums were too close to my body, making crossing over the drums difficult. After searching videos of professional DCI corps, I noticed other corps had the same issue. They fixed this by attaching two of the plates used to connect the drums to the carrier, extending the drums twice the normal length. For fun and to learn Fusion 360, I made my own plates that were ~3 times the length of the original plates, 3d printed some prototypes, and attached them to my drums.

Out of curiosity, I messaged one of the players from the Boston Crusaders, who also had this issue with the original plates, asking if my design was a good solution for the problem and asking for his opinion in general. He responded by asking to buy 5 sets of the plates for the 2021 season of DCI. I, of course, provided these parts to him, as well as the Blue Stars, which he had shared my images of these parts with them and they wanted them as well.

In 2022, the parts were seen all throughout DCI and WGI, and I was able to sell a Version 2 of the parts to the Blue Stars and Bringham Young University. The original parts from 2021 remained with the players who purchased them, and were taken to premier corps such as The Blue Devils and RCC Indoor Percussion.

In June 2023, the orginial company who made the original platesd saw my design, and promplty updated theirs to make the option of purchasing mine nonexistant.

I overall enjoyed this period of time since I got to apply my engineering skills to an activity I love and got to make a difference in the community.