Rube Goldberg Machine
A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction-type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.
Over the course of 7 weeks me and 2 other students in my class created a Rube Goldberg machine. We themed our machine bowling for a strike. While building we realized that our theme would be harder to protray than expected. Due to this we decided to emphasize our theme by using broken cd's and a contrast in colors to replicate a bowling alley. In the end the dominoes getting knocked over are supposed to be a succesfull strike. I have linked a video of our machine functioning, our power point presentation, and our construction log below.
Construction Log
Day 1: Brain stormed our theme and, completed our blueprint.
Day 2: Copied our blueprint onto our board and began to measure each piece of wood.
Day 3: We finished sawing and jigsawing the wood and screwed in our first piece of wood.
Day 4: Our group started constructing our pulley and ran into several problems because our first test run failed.
Day 5: We stoped working on the pulley, and started our lever.
Day 6: We searched for a PVC pipe and drilled two holes to loop with string and stuff items in the back in order for the pipe to stay in place.
Day 7: We screwed the third ramp and got our pulley to work by replacing the wood with a lighter wood.
Day 8: We installed the fourth ramp along with a cardboard piece vertically so the marble will bounce to the fourth ramp.
Day 9: We had cut 3 inch stairs on the first day and drilled them in. Once that was completed we connected the last stair with a 4 inch long mini ramp.
Day 10: A screw was added. A screw going into the plastic screw allowed us to a just it anytime. The ball would go down a ramp too fast so we added carpet to create friction.
Day 11: Our group screwed in our last ramp that is 18 ½ inches long with a 5 inch incline connected to a 8 inch flat board.
Day 12: We started to paint the base black and painted two ramps and realized we forgot to include a wedge, so we added a mini cardboard triangle wedge with string attached.
Day 13: We completed the painting section of our project and started on the decorations for our theme (Bowling), so we massed a few CD’s and added a bit of hot glue to the back of the CD’s and placed them to the wood. We painted our title and the other words that represent parts of our project and we completed our final product.