It’s taken me just under 48 hours to get this far. Although i wouldn’t say its completely finished.. it’s a good as. I might just polish it off with a lick of paint and other aesthetically pleasing type things. As you can see, I’ve modeled it on the Pratt Truss. Although, I didn’t do any “real” plans, just rough drawings
Video of a large Pratt truss bridge being loaded to failure
We found that it holds 5lbs so far and potentialy more, considering our first bridge broke with a large ball of string as the weight and our second broke with a coke can. I think our success rate was pretty high
Here is a bridge using the K truss design made from Balsa wood. This bridges uses a combination of end and lap joints. You can see that where the slanted members of each K join together at the vertical member, there is an end joint. At the top and bottom chords, the joint is a … Read more
This is the absolute best video I have seen about building model bridges. Roy Coleman, the founder of the International Bridge Building Contest, gives a very informative presentation in this video. The presentation is over an hour long. He shows how to build a bridge from scratch. He is gearing his video towards the…
Here is the Science Olympiad bridge J.C. Booth built for the Georgia State Tournament in 2005. I don’t remember exactly what place it got, but am pretty sure in placed in the top 3. This bridges uses the typical design for that year, with slight modifications
This is an older bridge I came across when browsing through my old Science Olympiad photos. I used both Balsa and Basswood to build this bridge. This bridge was part of my design process which ended up with my SO winning bridge in 2004
Bridge constructed with drinking straws & spaghetti. Pinned connections between straws with spaghetti. Bridge span across deck = 50cm, supported below at half span. Was skeptical about the bridge holding the weight of the brick but it do so easily.
I just completed a new toothpick bridge that’s quite different than my last one. It’s an arch made from curved trusses, formed once again with toothpicks and wood glue. This one won’t be tested either (sorry!) because it was made for a friend who creates custom action figure dioramas. But I designed the bridge to have the highest ratio of maximum load to bridge weight and some ad hoc tests made me pretty optimistic
Hi this is Hyun Seok Yoon. As the title says, I just made my first bridge for Science Olympiad! Although it took me 12 hours (whew..!) I could see the good result! It held 15kg!