Building A Rollercoaster

 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.

 I did it, I finally did it! I finally finished a piece of test track and put my cart on it. It was the most gratifying part of this whole project so far to fit the cart on and slide it around. I even sat on it, and wiggled a little bit. I'm happy to report that it held my weight and did not break. The supports and the rollercoaster frame felt really solid. We're really starting to go places with this project! The next step is to do some stress testing; finding the near-breaking point of both the track and the cart (I don't want to sabotage all my hard work completely).

 Sorry for not posting last week, I completely forgot! So to make up for that, I'll make a post today about what I did last week. Last week was exciting! I finally got everything in the right place. It's not all screwed down just yet, but still! I didn't really get to get a sense of how it rolled, so I guess I'll find out some time this week when I go in again. Apart from working on my 'coaster,  I also helped another student learn some of the basics about Blender.