Fastener Lab

          This fastener project required immense planning and team work. Our goal was to create a sculpture from at least three pieces of wood using a designated fastener. I worked with Anthony Labriola on this project and our fasteners were paperclips. Usually paper clips are used to hold paper together, so we knew we were in for a challenge. We decided to build a fun, well known sculpture. Right away we knew that we wanted to create a field goal, about the size that could be used for a game of paper football. The overall point of the project was to learn how we can engineer different forms of objects by connecting their joints.

          This is our final project and I feel that it is similar to what I first imagined. It was hard to keep the posts and cross bar balanced but we worked together and pulled it off. It may seem like smooth sailing, but it wasn't. Parts feel apart constantly and we started to run out of time toward the final days of building. Frustration was upon us but we got it together and worked like a team to build the best sculpture we could.

          I feel that Steve, Nolan and Armando had a great idea that they really put together well. They seemed to be able to pause time within their sculpture and create floating water. Now that looks difficult to engineer. Another group that I saw work well was Mike Desmond's. They made another field goal, like us, but they used rubber bands. I really liked how they were able to balance it well and it seems like they were well-strategized in putting the rubber bands in the most efficient positions. Now we all have the knowledge about different fasteners that we could possibly put to use in future projects that are assigned. I had fun building our field goal and was able to learn a lot about different fasteners.

Build a Compound Machine

          This project made our simple machine groups think about how we can get the most mechanical advantage using three of our simple machines. The three our group used were the pulley, lever and wheel and axel. We knew that we had to step it up because the other groups had great ideas as well. We decided to put the machines together like this:

          We had the wheel and axel as the primary location for input energy. We then wrapped a string around the dowell and that string traveled through the pulleys and up to the lever up top. The weight was placed upon the opposite side of the lever than the string. We also increased the wheel and axel rotational radius, making it very easy to achieve an immense mechanical advantage. I recall that we achieved  an advantage of 90. As I remember, it was one of the highest in the class. I cannot think of a way to make our structure much better without cheating.
          It was challenging to prevent the dowels from bending because of how much weight we added at once. Also, we had trouble keeping the wheels of the pulleys aligned because the string wasn't in a straight line. I'm glad that we were able to overcome these obstacles by adding reinforcements to the structure, also adding to its stability. If we were assigned this project again, but adding in the inclined plane, I think I'd have a good idea of even increasing our mechanical advantage.