Post date: Oct 4, 2017 1:38:48 PM
The rubber band car was a very different project than the boxes or the hall pass. It was much cooler, much harder and therefore required some experimentation. Thanks to some friends of mine, that wasn't really needed. It was discovered a while ago that if you had a much bigger back wheel, the car goes much farther and pretty fast too. Also, putting on the rubber band became easier. First, I found the designs for the car on the website. I laser cut the design and glued it together. Then I glued the wheels on the pencils and then i put on the rubber band. But this was just for the first version of the car. I'll admit, this was a much harder project than i expected since the car has to be able to jump about 2 feet in order to get the full points.
I have created two more cars since. One was the car from the template. It didn't work because the rubber band turned the axle too fast and the wheel did have traction. So the car went barely 6 inches. I tried my best to fix this but it didn't work. The next car i created was after the recommendation of some of my classmates. They said the wheels should be smaller than the first one I created. They also said it should be thicker. So I made the wheels 6 inches in diameter instead of 10, and printed two wheels instead of one wheel so it was much thicker. I tried this and the result was the same regardless.
My inspiration and my resources for this project were mainly my classmates. As very talented makers and engineers, they understood the principles of movement much better than I did and was able to help me. Since I have a lot of experience with laser cutting, I didn't learn any new laser skills.
The middle and sides of the car.
Front wheels of the car
Huge back wheels of the car. As you can see they are much bigger than the other set of wheels.
The rubber band car.
The rubber band part of the car
The rubber band car in action. It moved the full 10 meters in the hallway.
Car "blinged" up. I taped the wheels and the main body
Evel Knievel Jump. It Made It!!! It made the 1ft jump.
Using different types of tape makes it look better.
This is the tape I used on small wheels.