curious question...

[pony_sprite]

Has anyone ever built a bridge out of spaghetti? Or had any experience with good bride designs? If so please let me know. I have to come up with a bridge design and then make it out of spaghetti for my class and hope it has the highest load to weight ration in my class (i need an A). Teacher says we can use any resources we can find. So i figured

Comments

[sidhne]

What kind of class is this?

[alricthemad]

Simple questions:
What are the min/max dimensions of the bridge?
How much spaghetti can you use?
What else can you use in construction (tape, glue, etc)
How is the weight to be applied?
At what point is the capacity of you bridge determined to be 'Final' IE, Flex by so much, breakage, etc

Simple suggestions:
Triangles are best
Save weight on the bridge deck by not covering the whole thing if you don't have too
Your best bet is a box design. Maybe an Arch support depending on how the bridge is to be tested.

[pony_sprite]

i updated the post to include the requirements and things that i think should answer your questions.

[alricthemad]

1 Meter? wow, that is a long bridge from spaghetti.
I think Becka is your best resource here.

[meapet]

We did a playground made of reed once, where we wet the reed and then let it set- unfortunately sphaghetti doesn't work like that.

[lil_laurel]

SPAGHETTI BRIDGE IS AWESOME!

We had to do it for our intro to Civ Eng class, and my group had the best load to weight ratio. It was ugly as sin, but basically, we hot glued the dry, not broken, pieces into bunches, and built using that. The weight was high, but it was also very strong. I can't any pictures online, sadly, but it was a pretty simple design with triangles on the sides kind of like the first one here.

[lil_laurel]

ah man, seeing your edits - 1 METER? that's pretty serious. Ours were a lot smaller.

[becalyn]

This is actually a design project I used to have the students in my Engineering Tech class do. I can definitely give you some pointers as to what kinds of designs held up best...as well as what materials. If you want, send me an email.

[alricthemad]

Ah well, I guess the expert is going to be more help.
I didn't know you did engineering, very kewl