Balsa Wood Bridge

Introduction: Francesca Murray, Sabine Mann, and Zoe Wood

During the process of building our bridge, Washington Latin Public Charter School Data:
we designed and executed our schematic 5200 2nd St NW, Washington, DC 20011
design. We had to use our problem Bridge Weight held Strength to
solving skills, when encountering flaws in Procedure and Set Up:
Weight weight ratio
the final design. Throughout the process
of creating our bridge, we aimed for
having a strength to weight ratio that was 18.1lb 12lb 0.66lb
over one. While looking for ideas for what
type of bridge to build we came upon this
video1 testing the different bridges, we Conclusion:
were inspired and used aspects of their
bridges in ours. ● In conclusion, we did not meet our
Research Objective: research objective which was to have a
weight ratio over 1, even though we did
Our Objective for this project was to Figure 1, The process: Figure 2, Sides: get close with a 0.66
design and create a bridge that would Since our schematic After the laminated sides dried we
● Our bridge was mostly well executed
design was approved, we moved onto woking on the top,
hold more weight then itself, so that it but had weak points on the angles and
moved on to laminating sides, and bottom so that we
would have a strength to weight ratio of would have more time to work on height of our sides.
parts of bridge so that it
one. could dry before working it since it could readdy effect the ● Our sides weren’t very even and
on the rest of the bridge. outcome of the bridge because of that that sides broke first.
Materials:
● Another reason why they sides broke
-Balsa Wood -Measure stick first was because of the angels were not
-Glue -Wax paper even so they were more likely to break
-Knife apart.

Schematic Design Revisions:

While building our bridge we References:
decided to change the length
of our bridge so that the weight
Figure 4, The breaking:
Figure 3, The final bridge:
would be distributed more Once our bridge was built, we
We glued all the sides to the base
evenly. With this we had to hung a bucket on it and added 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
and the top to create the final
review the angles and how the sand until it broke to find out how
different pieces of wood would
bridge
much weight it could carry.
v=zbOlZC94YUQ
come together