CRI Day 5

Note: I missed a few blog posts, as Amy and I have mostly been posting on her blog (http://extd111-afeldman.blogspot.com/). We will be setting up a joint blog soon.

Anyway, Amy was sick today, so I started out the day working on our dock model. I was figuring out how to make the sides of the "tub" part of our "water elevator" model connect to each other. We were thinking about using magnets, just for our model, because it wouldn't work very well for the final dock. So I started by considering embedding a piece of metal in one piece of foamcore while having the magnet on the outside of the opposing piece of foamcore, but the magnets weren't strong enough for this to be a viable option. So I quickly moved on to embedding the magnet in the opposing piece of foamcore, which would put the magnets closer together.

The magnets and metal bars.

 

At this point, however, Professor Banzaert came over and suggested that I spend some time calculating the dimensions of the "tub" and the weight of the water we would be lifting in our elevator. It took me over an hour to find all of the measurements I needed, but I finally found them and did the calculations....

Just in case you can't read that: we would need to lift approximately 14.375 metric TONS. Even if we could figure out a way to do this, it would most likely not be at all affordable, so that idea was out...

Next up, working on our second semi-finalist: The Launching Pad

The Launching Pad idea was modeled after the EZ launch. The EZ launch was built for the far sturdier kayaks and canoes, so we will have to make some modifications for the more fragile rowing shells.

EZ Launch