Prototyping Blog Documentation Week 5

For this week, we continued to improve our bridge designs before finally testing them by putting as much weight as possible on them to see how many times their weight they could hold. 

For my bridge, I made the additions of multiple diagonal spaghetti pieces on each of the supports on my bridge, as shown in these pictures: 

I added these in order to reinforce each of the supports to maximize their strength for as few spaghetti pieces as could fit. 

There wasn’t much else I thought I could add, so I was satisfied with my design and was ready for the test.

Just before the test, my bridge was weighted and came out to be 211.6 grams, which was the second lowest weighted bridge out of the class. I had thought it would be heavier given how much spaghetti and glue I used but was surprised it is as light as it was. Then came the moment of truth. Here is the video of my bridge being tested:

And here is the aftermath: 

My bridge was able to hold a collective weight of 4061 grams, just a little over 19 times its weight! This was the largest weight to carry amount out of the rest of the class’s bridges, which I was surprised to have achieved! I am very proud of my design as such. With that said, I noticed that the middle part of my bridge was able to hold its own fair well despite the load it was carrying. Had the one end of the bridge not break or been reinforced with another set of diagonal spaghetti pieces, I think my bridge would have been able to hold even more weight. Regardless, I had a lot of fun with this challenge and am proud of the design that I came up with!