Week 3 Constructing Environments

This week we first had a workshop where we were given two different types of materials to construct a bridge that would span 1.1 meters roughly. Our group was given (35x35x1200) x 2 pieces of pine and (3x60x1200) x 2 pieces of plywood.

First our group brainstormed ideas about how to construct a strong bridge that thought outside of the box, firstly I realized that the strength of the long skinny plywood, was actually in its depth, much like a beam. These two pieces then became the center point around which we constructed our structure of our bridge. We developed a plan to use one of the pine pieces as the center beam for which we then cut up the other pieces of pine to run across the center beam at a perpendicular angle. These other pieces were then used to screw on the two pieces of plywood and hold them together.

We then tested each of our bridges on a load-bearing machine. After the other designs had reached there maximum point of stress they would crack. One cracked because of a weakness in the pine because of the knot in the grain, another one cracked maybe because it was around a nail where it had split the wood, again that weakened the grain.

However ours used the strength of the two ply wood pieces down the outside, so these two first began to buckle and bend and finally crack before the pine reached its point of stress and broke, because our design incorporated both elements strengths ours was the strongest.