When the curtain opens for “Oklahoma!” on November 9th, the audience will see a farm setting complete with a windmill, farm equipment, and a farmhouse.

What they won’t see is the mechanical talent it took to get those props stage-ready.

Engineering students, with the help of teacher Caleb Watson, built the windmill motor and cleaned the rust off the farm equipment to get them ready for the performance.

“Theater teacher Lisa Newton came down here and I asked if she needed anything,” Mr. Watson said. “She said, ‘Interestingly enough, we have a windmill we want to power, and we don’t know how to do that.’”

Engineering students Joesph Bailey, Lawsen Platt, Julian Tobey, and Zach Harris built a motor system that allowed the windmill to rotate, oscillate, move side to side, and run for at least an hour.

“I picked some of my engineering kids from last year and some I had this year,” Mr. Watson said. “I presented it to them, and they took off and ran with it. It took them a week and a half to get the installation build done, and now we are waiting on parts from theater.”

But that’s not the only thing they have done for the show.

“We have a bunch of rusted farm equipment, and they have an electrolysis machine,” technical director Eric Cox said. “They dumped the rusted equipment in a bath that has baking soda and water and they ran electricity through it to zap off the rust. When we got it back, all we had to do was brush some rust off.”