As part of my structures investigations I’ve decided to have a go at the spaghetti bridge challenge.
Sound odd doesn’t it 
It involves making a bridge structure out of nothing but spaghetti and hot melt glue following a list of task parameters. The official spaghetti bridge world championships has a very stringent set of rules to follow involving a meter wide gap, a restriction in height and weight of your final structure and using only spaghetti that has not been tampered with (so no making your own and including any interesting ‘addatives’).
The current world champion bridge held over 4ooKg before it failed!!
I’m not trying to compete with this in any way, shape or form so… as I’m only doing this to investigate the forces involved in bridge building I’ve cut down the requirements to give myself something that it atchievable in the two days I have set aside for this:
- The bridge must span a gap of 40cm
- It must be made from only spaghetti and hot melt glue
- it must not brace against the inner sides of the span
- It must not exceed 20cm in height
- it has to have a deck at least 5cm wide
To start with I’m going to have a look at the weight bearing capabilities of spaghetti and try out a couple of typical bridge structures to see which is stronger.
Here goes