This was so fiddly to make!! Spaghetti does not submit gracefully to being made into a bridge, anyway here’s pics of the bridge in construction:

I’ve worked out that my final bridge was made out of approximately 176 strands of spaghetti, if my bridge is to hold as much as each individual strand can hold it should support 4,602g. However as it’s made of glued together bundles I’m not sure to what extent this will be true, some of the glued bundles were stronger but some were in face weaker. We shall see…

Crud!

It only made it to 3,600g!! I really think that this is down to the glue failing as the weight was increased. I’d like to try this again at a later date using different materials and different glue.

Note 11/05/2010

Some of the other students have also been making bridges using art straws, this seems to be much more successful, the glue gun glue joint don’t fail and the bridges seem to correspond with the simulations run using West Point Bridge Designer.

Steve was testing a Warren truss and I decided to test out my analysis skills by predicting where it would fail, I chose the two central, horizontal struts as they would be under the most force from compression. 3 kilos later and I was right!

The two struts along the top edge of the bridge were being put under huge amount of compression as the weight was added, if the bridge was well made this would definitely be the fail point.

i had a go at recreating my own bridge using the program to have a look at where it should have failed if the glue joints had been good enough:

So it would probably be the same two struts that failed on Steve’s bridge even with my vertical reinforcements.

Possibly something to experiment more with over the summer?