woensdag 20 mei 2009

Winning the competition

The spaghetti contest was after the standup architecture course, so thanks to this course we had already a very good geometry for this contest. But still this geometry was a theoretical one, building it is something different. We chose to build the geometry which would suit the best for making the bridge out of compression and tensile components which were optimized during the standup course to perform the best on both normal force and bending moments.

Finally the weight of the bridge was about 825gram and it carried about 54 kilogram, which was enough to win the competition. A funny fact is that the bridge didn't break on the spaghetti itself, the wooden strip actually broke. This wooden strip is given by the organization and holds the hook that carries the load.

But as you can see we're holding three cheques, the 1000 euro is for winning the strength competition. The 600 euro is for winning the beauty contest, we did that with another bridge which we built in one day:



The last 200 euro we one with a second price for making a specific assignment within 3 hours.
The assignment was making a tower of 50cm high as light as possible which should carry 4 kilograms, but it was prohibited to build in a square of 10 by 10 cm until 30cm high.
Finally our tower was the second lightest (2 gram difference) which could carry the 4 kilograms.