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Building Supports
Pillars: We ran into many struggles while building the supports. Firstly, we had to split the planks exactly in half or the supports would be uneven. In the end we failed at splitting them exactly from the start so we decided to put small strips of wood on the bottoms of the shorter legs to even them out. Additionally, halfway through making one of the pillars we realized we had attached two of the sides upside down, leading to us having to restart that pillar. Another issue we ran into during the building process was properly aligning the corners. For one of the sides we realized halfway through building that one corner that the two sides weren't properly aligned. So we had to melt all of the glue bonds and rebuild it. The final issue was that once we finished building the supports they began flexing under pressure, so we had to add an internal structure, which solved the issue.
Trusses: When building the trusses we had a major miscommunication that contributed heavily to the failure of the bridge. We were building our trusses off of a design we had drawn on the whiteboard, but we failed to clarify within the group the amount of sticks per truss to use. Two of us created one entire truss before realizing that each stick we had used was supposed to be four sticks glued together. Ideally we would have been able to restart that truss, but because we were low on time, we had to resort to simply gluing in the 3 missing sticks per member. Unfortunately this solution was not perfect because these four sticks were not connected and this led to the trusses ballooning out during the brick test and blocking the roadway. In the future we will definitely communicate our intentions behind our designs and label them clearly on the diagrams to eliminate a mistake like this happening again.
Roadway: When building our roadway our main objective was to create a stable, level surface for the cart to roll over. We had to navigate the fact that our roadway had to be four feet long, yet our longest piece of wood was 3 feet. We couldn't just glue them together because they would snap, so we spent some time planning the best way to overlap and interweave both vertical and horizontal strips to create a base that was both sturdy, and flat. We had to add planks on the top to fill gaps and spacers on the bottom to hold it up and keep it level because parts of our road were two layers and others were one. In the end, our roadway was pretty sturdy, but definitely could have been improved as it couldn't even hold the cart without the supports.
New additions/issues:
As we built our bridge we ran into many problems we did not see coming. One issue was that our bridge was potentially too skinny to fit the cart. To fix this we went and measured the cart and our road and because our road was two inches wider we thought it would be fine. Unfortunely it was not fine befcause we forgot to account for the fact that the trusses took up road space and in the end, it was because the cart hit the buckling in trusses that broke our bridge.
Another unexpected snafu we ran into was the fact that we made our pillars to wide, so that our roadway was not long enough to span from one to the other, keeping a three foot gap in between. We had to troubleshoot this issue, and ended up attaching two planks to the top of the pillars for the roadway to attach to.
Last, we realized that our square pillars were prone to twisting and buckling so we decided to add trusses within it to turn that one square into four triangles.
Finished Product/Result: In the end our bridge managed to hold up four bricks before falling apart with five. As seen in the video below, the main reason that our bridge collapsed was because of our miscommunication with the trusses. Because we were unable to glue one side of the trusses together, they ended up ballooning out into the roadway, blocking the cart and forcing us to snap them to get through. After they snapped, the roadway was not strong enough to support the load and it all fell from there. We definetly realized we should have spent more time on the roadway and trusses after that. One major success we did have though was that our pillars that we spent many hours on survived the crash, and even afterwards were still strong enough to hold up Edwin when he stood on them.
bridge video.mp4What we would do differently: If we could do this project all over again, there are three main things we would do differently.
Communicate our intentions better.
If we had communicated and labeled our designs and blueprints better, we would have avoided altogether the issue with our trusses, and potentially had a much more successful bridge.
Plan ahead more
We ran into many last minute issues that could have been predicted had we considered other factors. Things such as our roadway being too short and trusses needing to be conected were issues that could have been prevented had we thought to plan ahead for it.
Divide our time differently.
We spent a very long time on our pillars for the bridge. Although this time did pay off, and our pillars never ended up breaking, the time we sacrificed on the roadway and trusses did show as those were the two elements that led to the failure of our bridge.
Conclusion:
All in all, we are happy with the amount our bridge held and have learned many different lessons in time management, teamwork, prioritization, and specificity that we will carry on to future projects and jobs.
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