To see the lyrics of this song, click here

The New Message Board

It has been a long time since I posted here. I have been attending college, and haven’t had much time to devote to model bridge building. However, over Christmas break I have been performing maintenance on the website, and added a few small things.

In the few remaining days of my break I may try and finish the music video to my song, the Bridge Builder Blues. I want to film it on a historic bridge, but there are a few difficulties of doing that.

I am still thinking about running a local contest for the West Point Bridge Design contest again this year.

I want to update my ebook, 5 Steps to Building a Model Bridge sometime.

I also want to make a video on bridges. I haven’t quite narrowed the subjects down much, but I know I want it to be a fun and educational video. I don’t know when or if this will ever happen.

Popsicle bridges provide a unique challenge because of the limited length of the popsicle sticks. This hurts the inherent strength especially in tension. Ideally, a member of the bridge in tension would be one long continuous piece. This obviously can’t happen with a popsicle stick bridge. The way to overcome this is to glue several popsicle sticks together trying your best to create strong connections between the sticks.

Popsicle sticks are fairly strong, but did you know that not all popsicle sticks are equal? You have to be careful which popsicle sticks you choose to use on your bridge.

Click here for some sweet popsicle bridge plans.

Cool Popsicle Bridge Websites:

http://andrew.triumf.ca/andrew/popsicle-bridge/
http://students.seattleu.edu/clubs/asce/Site/Popsicle%20Bridge%20Competition.html
http://www.seattleasce.org/seattleasce/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=2&tabid=40
http://www.mohawkcollege.ca/events/popstick/popstickframeset.html

Many people ask “Where is the the best place to buy balsa wood online?” The best website I know of is Specialized Balsa LLC. The owner, Jake Zimmer, has been in the balsa business for years and knows what he is doing. Once I had Jake cut me some 1/32″ x 1/32″ sticks of Balsa just to see if he could do it. He did, and they were absolutely perfect. He also cut me a 3″ x”1/64″ x 36″. I have no real use for these, but still it is cool to have around.

Overall, I have been very impressed with the quality and precision of the cuts that come from Specialized Balsa. I have also ordered from other online companies, and bought from local hobby stores but Specialized Balsa is the best. They also have limited pre-weighted sticks of balsa for competition purposes, which is great. One thing that I really thought was neat is that the balsa sheets come with a sticker with the weight on them precise to a 1/100 of a gram. Very professional.

Man Vs. Wild is a show where a man, Bear Grylls, is dropped off in various wildernesses and is left to survive with extremely limited tools and supplies. Man Vs. City will be a lot more funny if you have actually seen the show, but even still you might find our spoof amusing. Unfortunately, we had a limited time to film this, as we were only visiting the bridge. I wish we could go back and re-shoot some of the scenes, but that just isn’t an option. We used my Canon A620 Powershot to film, so the quality isn’t the best. The wind blew very hard on top of the bridge, so that messed with some of the vocal recording.

Without further delay, Man Vs. City.

Man Vs. City

If you like our spoof of Man Vs. Wild, please rate it on both Google Video and Youtube.

The answer to that question is not simple and probably is not going to be what you expect. The truth is, I cannot answer the question. There are too many variables that are not being defined. Example:

Is the the Pratt truss or the Warren truss stronger? Actually, the answer is up to you. You can make the Warren truss stronger. Or you can make the Pratt stronger. It depends simply on the strength of the wood you use. You can use 2×4’s to build the Warren, and toothpicks to build the Pratt. Obviously the Warren is going to be stronger in this case.

A Better Question

I think though, many people are trying to ask whether or not one of these trusses has an inherent advantage over the others. In my mind, none of them do. If you look at my truss design page, you will see that each truss spreads a load out differently, but none with an apparent advantage. Conclusion: no bridge design has an inherent strength over another.

However, this conclusion only applies to this general setting. It may be that in a specific situation one bridge design would be better suited than another. It is up to you to examine how each truss works and decide which one to use.

My brother, cousin, and I filmed a short spoof of the TV show, “Man Vs. Wild” on this bridge. We call ours “Man Vs. City.” You can watch it here:
Man Vs. Wild Spoof

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 and the loading block fell through. I didn’t anticipate the amount of force that would be pushing outwards. Normally my boomilevers broke at the joint to the attachment base.

I later tried to add additional bracing but the boomilever never held more than 10kg. I think at the end of the season I was close to an efficiency score of 1000. My team didn’t make it past regionals that year, so I didn’t have a reason to try for more.

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 have some info on it, I would love to hear from you.

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 to cut my own strips of wood, and I was not very good at doing that yet. The wood I used was very thin, perhaps too thin. I believe I used 1/32″ x 1/4″ strips.

I could not cut the wood strips very straight, and that was the downfall of this bridge. The pieces to the I-beam were not glued together well at all.

I was trying out some unique things with this bridge. And if I had better building skills, it might have turned out much better.

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 to do join the arches in the middle. So I simply made an A frame bridge. I never knew how much it weighed as our Science Olympiad team did not have a scale back then. The bridge held about 30 pounds, just 3 pounds short of the magical 15 kilogram mark (33 pounds). Back then the Science Olympiad bridges had to hold the entire 15kg or they would be ranked in the 2nd tier.

This bridge was built only out of basswood, except for the roadbed. Even back then I understood the power of Basswood ;). I used Epoxy glue to build this bridge. That is because my bridge building coach used it, and I followed his example. I don’t use epoxy glue for bridges anymore, though I have used it for other things. Read more about choosing the right glue.

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 get the arches to the perfect length, so that they barely fit into the loading device. I had made these arches a bit too long. When I tested the bridge, the arches were already bent out-of-shape, so it did not hold enough weight.

I fully believe that this bridge concept can go very far.

As you can see, this bridge had a roadbed, which was supposed to allow a hotwheels or matchbox car to roll freely across. BAD DRIVER!