Week 4 JournalIn this week’s tutorial, we were given the chance to put everything we have learnt to practice. However, my group was struggling for the first few minutes, before we finally decided on the idea of combining all the wood that we have been given together into one thicker and stronger beam. We only decided to do something like this because we felt that we were limited by the amout of materials we were given, and the fact that the beam has to be at least 1m long, and that the wood we have been given are only 1.2m in length.

After we have made our decision, we combined our two thickest pieces vertically and horizontal-ly. We felt that with two surfaces joint this way, it would be able to carry the most amount of pres-sure. After that, we just simply cut up the thinner wood and hammered them onto the bottom and sides of the beam.

Week 4 Journal

Eventhough our beam didn’t appear to be as technical as some of the other groups, our beam managed to handle the second most amount of pressure in our tutorial group - 235kgs.

As the amount of pressure placed on the beam rose higher, the thin layers of wood on the sides began to flick outwards and failed to carry its weight after that. Because were in such a rush to-wards the end of the experiment, we weren’t paying attention to details and didn’t put more nails in the middle section of the beam to prevent that from happening.

If we could have secured each ele-ments of the beam together more carefully, the beam would have been able to carry at least another 50kg of weight on top of it.

However, i was still quite im-pressed with our results as we barely had any time left at the end of the session.

Week 4 Journal

This is a model that another group has produced in the session. It uses the elemt of tension to keep the bridge shaped beam steady, and the overall design appear to be quite clever.

However, this design wasn’t able to handle as much pressure as what we have created with our beam, which didn’t quite involve much of the things we have learnt in our tutorials and lec-tures.

The one problem that led to the failure of this beam is that the two legs weren’t attatched to the main horizontal beam tightly enough, eventhough there were 4 supporting sheets of wood on the two sides. As pressure built up, the horizontal beam maintained its form, however, the legs began to drift outwards which eventually led to one breaking off the side.

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