In this past week we each made our individual preliminary K'Nex designs. All of us made our designs on pen and paper, actually making very similar designs. The basic concept was to utilize triangles as much as possible, making many isosceles triangles and trying to avoid the longer members when possible. In the class last week, we also got a bunch of the K'Nex pieces to mess around with, get some initial visualization with the parts, and see what members work with what to see what shapes could be made. This coming week we will take the best of each design and collaborate on a better design. The main problem our group could run into is disagreements on which features to use in our bridge, but I am sure we can get past those.
This last week we starting moving from using the CAD software West Point Bridge Design to the physical K'Nex pieces. These are somewhat similar in that they allow you to use different length members and things of that, but that is where the similarities stop with the two. WPBD allows for more freedom when designing a bridge than K'Nex, to start with, because only angles possible with K'Nex are 45 and 90 degrees. This makes it extremely difficult to make arch K'Nex bridges, which in my opinion is a much stronger bridge than the one I designed my previous blog post. Another difference is the fact that WPBD disregards the gussets in bridge testing. In the software, when a bridge fails the members are what break, but with these K'Nex pieces the members won't be easily broken, so the first to fail is going to be the connector pieces. This means we will have to focus more on gusset strength in these K'Nex tests as opposed to member strength if we want our bridge to be able to minimize its cost-to-strength ratio.
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