Introduction
We are building balsa wood bridges in order to stress test them and see how much weight they can hold and then do a strength the weight ratio.
Inception and Design
I’ve done this project before in the previous year, not much changed from this year except for the student’s designs. This year I went for a little bit of a different design mostly because I couldn’t do the same thing as last year. The design I came up with wasn’t that much different, it was still a warren design, 20″ x 2″ x 1.3″.
Bridge Building Phase
The only issue I had with this project was that when we printed out my design on a 1:1 scale, the printer decided to not like me for some reason, and printed it slightly scaled up. So instead of printing 20″ across, it printed 21.15″. When we printed my second side the printer decided to listen to the software and actually print it 20″ across and I ended up with a lop-sided bridge.
Destruction phase
My bridge ended up breaking at a much higher weight than I thought it would get to. Sense my bridge was so misshapen I expected it to maybe hold 5kg, it ended up holding 17.3kg.
