Staquet Weekly Blog - Week 6

Last week in lab, as a group, we were given time to basically play with K'Nex in order to come up with ideas for our bridge that will be tested in the upcoming lab.  After building a few different designs and testing their weight capacities we were able to find a design that seemed to hold a decent amount of weight in comparison to its cost.  We made a few minor changes to the design while away from lab and have now finalized our bridge that will be tested in class.  During this class my team members and I hope to get a better idea of what other teams are doing, as well as what their cost to weight ratios are looking like in comparison to ours.

After working with the K'Nex this week I feel as though my opinion of the comparison between them and building a real bridge is about the same.  While the K'Nex are very convenient and easily constructed in comparison to an actual bridge, they are still extremely limiting in terms of their length and gusset angles.  There are a wide variety of differences between this plastic 24 inch bridge and a full scale steal construction bridge spanning 20 feet.  To me, the main difference is the simple fact that a 20 foot span, steal truss bridge would be designed and built with a purpose other than seeing how much weight can hang from it.  I would believe that the full scale bridge would have to have some kind of road surface or rail system running across it so that it can be used as an actual passage to move over an obstacle.  With this being said, the design of a "real" bridge would have to allow for something to pass through it without hitting any structural members, and also have to meet specific codes and regulations.  Another key difference is that a real bridge would have to be designed around the environment in which it will be built with materials and coatings that can allow for it to be safe and maintainable for years to come.  Designing a K'Nex bridge and designing a full scale bridge can be viewed similarly in the sense that they are both bridges that have a basic truss format and are designed to hold weight, but the differences between the two are endless and depend a lot on the situation in which a bridge is needed.