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.
