Mousetrap Car

Over the past two weeks James and I constructed the mousetrap car.  Here are all of the progress and test pictures and the final product.  

The Starting Lineup:  Mousetrap

Bamboo Skewers

Foam Board and

 Wire Hanger

Combined make an astonishingly low-friction axle!

Almost as astonishingly beautiful as this random man in a field!

We initially attempted to make the axles out of coiled wire hanger.  The friction was low with these axles as well, and it was stronger than the foam bard.

However, because of difficulty with making uniform axles we reverted back to wire and foam board.  This time we super-glued multiple pieces together for stronger support

 We sanded down one side for a uniform frame of reference.

 We cut circles out of the foam board to attach to the CDs and then the wire axle.

 We put one on each side of the CDs for support.  Here hunter works his magic with the crazy glue.

 After some consideration we decided that three pieces of foam bard had enough structural integrity for our purposes.

 In this picture you can see the finished wheels.  The mousetrap is still not attached at this point.

 Here the Crazy Glue Guru glues the axle to the first wheel.

And here he attaches the second one.

 At this point we hot glued the bamboo skewers to the mousetrap. As we began to attach our mini CD containing the game Wolverine (TM) distributed by Burger King (TM) in 2001 All Rights Reserved, we realized that our wheel base would over 15 cm! To fix this problem we decided to move our mini CD to under the mousetrap.  

 Here you can see our completed mousetrap car, "The Preying Mantis."

 

In these pictures you can see a nice profile of  The Preying Mantis.

 Here you can see the bamboo skewers and their roll in supporting the front wheel and back axle.

Completion of Note Card Structure Challenge!

Its been a busy week for Hunter and James but we have been working diligently on our note card tower.  Last weekend Hunter went on a college visit to Colorado, so James decided to work on the final tower construction. During the three day weekend, he cracked open a new stack of 100 crisp 3 by 5's and went to work rolling them into cylinders.  He quickly learned the most efficient way was to roll them around a bic pen, then inside out the resulting spiral.  On Monday he began the process of note card settling.  During tests at Logan's, Logan and Erario noticed an additive impact to the stability of the tower with the added levels of note cards.  This was found to be the small imperfections in the cylindrical supports.  James wanted to remove these imperfections from the picture.  To do this he made the first levels days before the attempt for the tallest tower.  He started by carefully setting up a 3 story tower with 6 supports per level and 2 horizontal, unfolded cards for surface area.

The next day, Tuesday, James continued to add to the tower, building it up to 5 levels, or 15 in.

The following morning, Wednesday, James went big and stacked 9 layers of note cards, a whopping 27 in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFcXcfUrvVg

That evening, Hunter went to James' house to finish up the project.  First they added one more layer to sum up to 10 layers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JstEXq9VS9k

After this they were feeling good and decided to go for 11 layers.  Unfortunately, our first two attempts were unsuccessful. 

Attempt 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q9hQmgZgb8

Attempt 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8P-tQH3XrY

Hunter noticed that some of the supports were not directly above the supports under them so he went about fixing them with the assistance of James.  After these cards were in a more structurally sound position, they proceeded to attempt 11 layers once more! The video speaks for itself!

~33 in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-AiXjXKIo

Mousetrap Car

Today James and I watched a few youtube videos of mousetrap cars that have been built by other people.  We see flaws in some and components of others that seem to work well.  We are planning on working this weekend on finalizing the notecard structure which will hopefully stand strong!  Also we would like to get a jump on the mousetrap car and get through a rough testing and planning phase for that project.

Note Card Vertical Extension Attempts

·      Today we decided that we were slightly off task in our goals.  We were trying to build the strongest supports for our tower, but we did not focus on the stability past one level.  With this in mind James accidentally came across a new support design in the shape of a cylinder.  He was rolling a note card onto a pen when it was not going very straight.  When he rolled it from the other end the already curled other end wrapped around the outside. This effect was duplicated by unwinding and rewinding existing spiral supports switching the inside and outside.

·      We moved away from the structure of four cylinders stacked repeatedly with a notecard in between. And we decided that a six card support system is a lot more stable and does not compromise too many cards needed to stack the textbook as high as possible. The pics show a start to a successful support system. We are thinking in our next session we will try to go for gold and use one hundred notecards to construct the final product. And if it fails, it will just be another testing day!

The revolutionary cylindrical support!

 First multi-level testing

 Our tallest 4 support tower we tried

 Tallest structure we constructed that held the APES textbook.

Tallest structure we made.  It did not work before James had to leave.

Initial Note Card Structural Experimentation

 Today, we (James and Hunter) designed a few different pillars to see which one would prove to be the most stable in our structure.  We made various pillars with triangular formations, some with one over-lapping edge to enhance the strength and keep them together and others with two over-lapping edges. We tested different heights as well to see what would be the most efficient for stacking but maintaining strength.  Then we tried circular formations.  The weakest circular pillar was not over-lapping but had slits cut into opposite sides of the card and then connected.  The circular formations overall proved strongest because of the repeated over lapping when wrapped around a pen for precision of consistency.  We are still discussing placement of the note cards under the textbook but we have decided to use a horizontal unfolded note card on top of each series of pillars.  In our best stress test, the more tightly wound note cards in a rectangular position protected the gummy bear for up to 45 lbs.  With these promising results, we observed that this formation of thin pillars was not as sturdy as we would have liked.  The attached pictures are of today's efforts.

Hunter is ready to go!

 A preliminary attempt with triangles.

 Thin Spirals.

The red gummy bear is a bit anxious!

The thin spirals holding 45 lbs! 

 An array of all the different types of pillars we tried.

Welcome to the LE Mechanics Blog!

We have begun initial brainstorming processes on the note card textbook support system and alternatively powered miniature automotive device.  In these initial stages Hunter proposed cylindrical forms as the basis for our note card textbook support system.  I (James) believe that triangles will be the perfect foundation for our textbook.  Even with these differences we will both have to agree which way to stack the note cards on top of each other works best.  Both of us will attempt to construct pillars, or whatever suits our imaginations, that we both believe will be the best our design choices can achieve.  Whichever design proves to be the most promising will be used, no hard feelings.