You have different packaging for different products, you wouldn’t put headache pills in a crisp packet for example. Packaging has to be fit for purpose, to get the manufacturers new big thing into your hands intact and with enough info that you know what to do (and not to do) with it. It’s also there to […]

This is a little bit of research I did last semester, as I’m continuing it my investigations on this site I thought I’d move it over :)  Packaging is used in just about every aspect of our lives, you can’t really get away from it, even if you try! It’s used to protect products in […]

Right that’s external forces but what about forces acting internally? Take this column for example: What are the forces acting within it to stop it crumbling into a heap, whats keeping it in equilibrium? The column is under compression so it pushes up against the ceiling and down against the floor to balance the forces […]

So I’ve got structures, forces and how forces are applied but what if you have more than one force acting on an object at one time? Dean used a really good visual example: think about a tennis ball floating on a pond, a pump is pushing the water in one direction and a breeze is […]

So now I know the structure and forced involved… what about the application of those forces? Distributed -  This is also known as a UDL (universally distributed load), it’s simply a load that it distributed along a surface. Concentrated – A load that is gathered on a point. Static – A load that does not move. […]

So here he is in all his glory: And finally… in flight! (sorry Dean didn’t have access to my video editing software!) You can see he’s still got a bit of clank and clunk in the movement but I think that it’s caused buy the weight rather than the mechanism. The Pegasus was made out of […]

Ok, I’ve got the types of structures down but what about the forces that act on them?   Compression This action is when a substance is put under force from each end, like standing on a block of foam, it is being compressed between your feet and the floor. If the material subject to compression […]

So, my first foray into the wide world of structures… There’s tone of information so I’m going to detail as much of it as I can here to act as a reference. Structures can be broken down first into two categories: natural and manufactured Natural structures are classified as ‘not being made by people and […]

In having a nosy at what my fellow students have been doing I’ve come across another digital logic device called a flip flop. The ever helpful Steve has aslo been building a binary counter but he has done it in a very different way to mine, he has used a chain of 4 linked D […]

So, first, what is going to make my dragon fly? As a said before I think that the best mechanism to replicate the movement of the Pegasus will be a crank. A crank is basically a lever attached to a rotating shaft, the diagrams below are from a great book ‘Cabaret Mechanical Movement’ by Aidan […]