pic: Mousetrap car for engineering class

[samir13k]

Originally Posted by techedguy

Has anyone else had to do this project with a load added to the vehicle? I have my students design the vehicle around carrying a 12oz canned soda. I've dubbed it the "Can-Dew" challenge and it gives us a good excuse to buy a lot of soda and have a fun and stressful day trying to beat each other for distance. Rules are (1) Mousetrap as the sole source of power...only 4 holes in the Mousetrap allowed (for mounting purposes only) and other than that it's pretty open to whatever they want to try.

yup! Our class is only allowed 1 mousetrap, no alterations allowed to the spring, flippy thingy mechanism, only allowed to take off the hook, locking mechanism for when the trap is set. (we just held the flipper thing down).

Anyways, we had to have a hook on our car so that a sled could be attached to it, the sled was light, and we would add weights at like 50g increments. Once the field was down to 2-3 cars, we would have larger increments until 1 of them showed signs of weakness. (pull distance was 5-6ft, cant remember)

And we are not allowed to have any soda We are in a computer lab