I just found some old pics of my first ever Science Olympiad bridge. These photos are 7 years old. Many props to my mom for keeping them.

Left to Right:
My coach, David, Me
The bridge weighed 58 grams if my memory serves me well. This was at my first every Science Olympiad competition at Gordan College. The [...]

Now that the 2007 Science Olympiad season is well over, I am releasing photos of a concept boomilever I made before regionals.
Here is a video of the testing of the boomilever:

The boomilever broke because of all the force that was applied outwards on the bottom chords. The boomilever simply “split” apart [...]

This bridge is the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge which is over the Cooper River in Charleston, South Carolina. It is North America’s largest cable stayed bridge. I got these photos when visiting family up there.

My brother, cousin, and I filmed a short spoof of the TV show, “Man Vs. Wild” [...]

This balsa bridge was built by some students of mine. It spanned 14 inches, weighed 8.1 grams, and held 29 pounds. That puts its efficiency at 1630.

This photo makes the bridge look a little lopsided. That wasn’t the case, however.

Here is a photo of where the bridge broke. Click the picture to get a really [...]

This balsa tower was 12 inches tall, 8 inches wide at the base, and tapered to a 2 inch square at the top. I only have about forty pounds of sand, so I ended up adding any heavy object in sight to the bucket. After putting in the ceramic mug used to pour the sand, [...]

Yes, this is one of the coolest bridges I have ever seen. Built by Booth Middle for the Science Olympiad Georgia State Finals in 2003, it placed 3rd. For those of you who don’t know Booth, keep reading.
Booth Middle School has won the Georgia State Finals as a team for longer than I can remember, [...]

Chamblee has always done well in Bridge Building. In 2001, they won the State finals in this event.
This bridge is from the 2003 GA State Tournament, the same tournament the Booth Bridge is from.

I was never able to fully develop and use this bridge. I got this idea from talking with a Science Olympiad coach in Ohio. Now I wish I had gone ahead and put more work into this. The next year, the bridge rules changed so that I could not use this concept.
The trick was to [...]

What is the coolest bridge on the planet? This is one of them:
Coolest Bridge

I still love Scotland’s Firth of Forth bridge, and the famous one from my birthplace, the Golden Gate bridge.
But that one that connects Sweden and Denmark is pretty cool! I wonder what it feels/sounds like when going under the water. It must [...]

This bridge was built by Michael in Quebec.
I have a bridge I built for a physics for engineers class I’m taking in cegep (QUEBEC). My partner and I didn’t have much confidence in it, but it blew the competition away! The design was a fairly straightforward arch as you can see. We primarily focused on [...]

Here are some pictures of European bridges I took on our family trip in December of 2004. Seeing these bridges was the highlight of the trip for me. Unfortunately we only were able to drive over one of the bridges, the Tay River Bridge. However, we did spent a lot of time walking on the [...]

I built this bridge for the 2005 Fernbank Science Center bridge design event. This is the strongest bridge I have ever built. The bridge spanned 16 inches, weighed 37 grams, and held 346 pounds. That puts its efficiency over 4200! I had never even come close to getting this amount of strength out of a [...]

Here is a picture of the George Washington Bridge that a friend of mine took recently.

Someone tipped me off to this cool bridge which is in the Grand Canyon:
The Skywalk

It looks a bit scary but very cool nonetheless.

Pictures taken on October 5, 2006.

From the east — The south truss

Underneath looking west — Underneath looking east

The south side again — The west truss

Links about the Greentop Road Bridge:
http://bridgehunter.com/ga/coweta/7750080/

This bridge was a pain to find, but I found it at last. Google Earth marks this as the historic Jones Bridge. I did find one mention of the bridge on the web, with the longitude and latitude coordinates, but nothing about the history of the bridge. The bridge is not listed in the National [...]

I am not exactly proud of this bridge, but it does bring back memories. It was the second bridge built by my old Science Olympiad Bridge Building partner, David, and I. As you can see, we were still in the beginning of our bridge building career. I assume David is still building bridges, as his [...]

This was one of my earlier bridges. I built it after talking with my uncle, who is a mechanical engineer. He suggested that I try using an I-beam. I don’t know how much this bridge weighed, but it did not hold very much weight.
I had problems making the two I-beams for this bridge. I had [...]

We had some of our cousins spend the weekend with us. After the initial greetings, Matt asked me, “Can we go finish the bridge?” We had started building a bridge last year, when they came over to visit. Matt had finished one side of the bridge. While I did help him design it, Matt did [...]

Came across this today. Here is a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Brooklyn Bridge
The website has some other interesting info about bridges, including screenshots of designs for the West Point Bridge Design contest. BTW, that contest starts today. If you haven’t checked it out, do so now.
http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/
It is free, and lots of fun to play [...]

Boy does this bridge bring back memories. I built this bridge in 2001, in the 7th grade. It was my first attempt at building a bridge on my own after building this bridge with my partner.

I had wanted to make an arch bridge, much like the Booth Bridge, but I didn’t have the building skills [...]

Some friends of mine recently took a road trip to to PA. On the way, they stopped by a famous bridge and took this awesome picture:

Click for a closer view
This is the New River Bridge in West Virginia. It was the longest single-arch steel span bridge when it was built in 1977. In 2003, however, [...]

Get plans for this bridge

This popsicle stick bridge was made from 40, unmodified popsicle sticks. The bridge spanned 12 inches, was 4 inches tall and 3 inches wide. I used only Elmer’s white glue to build the bridge. It weighed 57.4 grams (0.13 pounds), and held 90 pounds. Its efficiency score was 712.

This was [...]

This popsicle bridge was made from 58 unmodified popsicle sticks. It was 25 inches long, 4 inches tall, and 3 inches wide. I used only Elmer’s white glue to build the bridge. It weighed 86.5 grams, and held 45 pounds. Its efficiency score was 248.

I redesigned this bridge from the earlier version. The new [...]

This popsicle bridge was made from 98 unmodified popsicle sticks and WeldBond glue. It was 21 inches long, 4 inches tall, and 4 inches wide. It weighed about 150 grams, and held 140 pounds. Its efficiency score was 424.

This is the strongest popsicle bridge I have built so far.
The Destruction

I tested [...]

I came across this video footage on google video of a popsicle bridge contest:

It has some nice close ups of the loading. Enjoy :)

I have always been fascinated by sailboats. I loved to visit my grandparents in Florida, because it meant sailboat rides.
This is not the first time I have made a little sailboat. But it is the first popsicle boat I have made.
I started out using only the “reject” popsicle sticks that I would not use [...]

Built by Bill H.
Here is the email Bill sent me:I started making bridges about a year ago and have pictures to share with you. For the first bridge I used a set of plans that I found free on the internet from a guy who was in the army. The bridge plans were [...]

The South Portal
Bent Lateral Bracing
Bridge Profile
View To The East
The West Truss
Underneath Looking East
View To The West
Close Up of Gusset Plate
Another Close Up
The sub span

SalemRoadBridge

Links about the Salem Road Bridge:
http://bridgehunter.com/ga/troup/28501000/

This bridge won the 2004 GA State Science Olympiad Bridge Building competition. It weighed 9.47 grams, spanned 35cm, and held 15kg without breaking. The efficiency score was 1584. This bridge was made completely from Basswood. No Balsa or other wood was used.

The top chord was made from 2 sticks of 1/16″ square pieces, [...]

This tower was 24 inches tall, 6 inches wide at the base, tapering to a 1 & 1/2 inch square at the middle. This tower weighed 7.0 grams, and held 11kg for 2nd place at the 2005 GA Science Olympiad State Finals.

I am in the middle of building a tower for my Science [...]

I have pictures of yet another really cool historic bridge. This one is called the Sylamore Creek Suspension Bridge. My grandparents recently took a road trip to the Ozarks, and shot these photos for me.
Sylamore Suspension Bridge
This historic bridge is a suspension bridge, which makes it even more cool in my opinion. You don’t see [...]

The Whooping Creek Bridge was originally built in 1928 (According to here). Unfortunately, the bridge was closed in May of 2006 after a DOT inspection. 5 months later, no work has been done on the bridge. From what I understand, there is division on what to do with the bridge. Some people want to replace [...]

I really have nothing on this bridge. I have no idea what team it is from, how much it weighed, or how well it did at the Science Olympiad competition.
I have a picture of it, well, because I had a camera, and the bridge was there. So if you have seen this bridge before, and [...]

Most bridges are built to avoid water. But can you imagine a bridge built for water? A water bridge? Yes, a bridge that has a deck made with water. Boats float across this bridge.
Water Bridge
Snoops
This also has to be one of the coolest bridges.

Today I found out that the Whooping Creek Bridge on Clem-Lowell road has been reopened. This was good and bad news for me. My brother and I drove down there this morning to try and film something for the music video we are making (see previous post). We thought it would be the perfect place [...]