I''ve been taking a break from my project over the past couple weeks to focus on a research project that I'm doing for my English class called the I-Search. Basically, you choose a topic you're interested in, then you interview people involved in that topic to get their stories. Of course, I chose theme parks and theme park engineering. I've already interviewed two people; one who works at a company that supplies light and sound control systems to theme parks, and one who's an Imagineer (someone who designs and engineers rides for Disney parks)! It's been really exciting, and I loved hearing their stories about their journeys through the industry. I feel like it's really helped me get a better feel for what the industry is like. In any case, normal blogging should resume next week. Next I should be working on a sand-delivery system for the PVC pipes that doesn't spill everywhere (see previous week's post).
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Hi everyone! It's been a while since my last post, almost 4 months. Rest assured, I haven't given up. I'm still working on the project. It's just really hard right now to work out times to come in and work on the rollercoaster with my teacher. Even though I'm going to school in person now, he's still really busy. In any case, I was recently able to go in and work finally! Right now, I'm working on figuring out a process I can use to bend PVC. My solution was to "bake" sand in an aluminum pan until it was hot enough, then pour the hot sand into the PVC pipe as it lays over my form. However, things didn't exactly go as planned. The aluminum pan was too flexible, and as my teacher and i tried to pour sand into the pipe, it spilled everywhere. Because of this, the sand ended up cooling off way too much and so I didn't really get the bend I was looking for. I'm trying to figure out a solution to that right now; a sand delivery device that wi...
Alright, after a lot of testing and a lot of problem solving, we finally finished the Rube Goldberg! Here's the whole thing edited together. I tried to film and edit the video so that you could easily view each part of the chain reaction, but if you missed anything, you can look at my previous post where I go into a lot more detail. As for the actual rollercoaster, I haven't worked on it much for a while now. The problem is that I have to go into school to work on it, and my teacher is busy often. Another issue is that I don't have the right components to start working out the next phase of construction (making a complete circuit, curved/banked track sections). That said, we should be able to get back to a regular schedule very soon.
Finally, back to school! Or online school anyway. This week I'm working with several classmates on a Rube Goldberg machine for my physics final project! Now, it's no rollercoaster, but it's still very exciting and challenging from an engineering standpoint. There's a lot of problem solving and creative solutions that have to be figured out in order for everything to work correctly. Making a Rube Goldberg under any circumstance would be tricky, but because of Covid-19, it's even harder. So in order for everyone to be able to work on the project, we were forced to split the contraption in half; one half of the system would be at someone's house, and the other at the school's FabLab. The trickiest part by far was figuring out how to get the machine to continue from one location to another. We came up with a system where an input would signal to a computer to type a letter on a shared google doc. When the photoresistor on the other end sensed the brightness of t...
So you may have noticed I haven't posted any updates since October. That's not because I'm inactive, but it's just that the circumstances have been such that I haven't been able to go in and work on my project. First, it's been getting darker earlier, which makes it hard to go in and work during the day. I get out of school at 3:35pm, and the sun goes down around 5:00pm. This means that by the time I get to FabLab after school to work on my project, I only have about half an hour of sunlight left to work in. Also, I'm currently working on figuring out how to bend pipes, and I don't have all of the tools I need yet. The plan for bending them is to pour hot sand into the PVC piping to make it more pliable, then strap it to a jig to bend it. For that I need something to heat the sand in large quantities, and all I have right now is a small camping stove; so not quite enough. College applications has also taken up a large chunk of my time the last couple of ...
This week I finished a longer piece of track, and conducted some dynamic load tests to see how the cart and the track would hold up while moving. I'm happy to report that everything worked perfectly! The cart rolled really well, and the track was sturdy. The PVC piping ended up having a slight dip in the middle due to how it was stored, but it's not a huge deal. This was a huge milestone in this process! It's taken a year and a half to get to this point, but it was definitely worth it to see my idea come to fruition. I'm planning on making some curved tracks next, in order to test how the cart holds up under a higher G-Force.
I did some weight testing with bags of concrete of 60 lbs each. I placed four of them on the rollercoaster car frame to get a static load up to 240 lbs (109 kg). I also got started on a longer piece of track so that I can test the dynamic load. Next week I'll get to finishing the piece of track, and stress testing that as well. I'm also looking into how to do curved pieces of track, but I'm going to hold off on that until everything else is ready.