ASME Improv Design
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) group on campus likes to do "improv design challenges" a few times during the semester. Basically they give us some pizza, and tell us a design challenge that we split into groups and need to complete in 30-45 minutes. There is always a winner that gets some sort of prize. This time, we had to create a structure from Duct Tape, newspaper, and a few wooden dowels that would allow a 1/4" steel ball bearing to complete a loop, powered by a potato cannon.
20PSI was used, and the gun didn't have enough power to do much, so this improv design kind of failed everyone. However, after we were all done, we played with some higher pressures and blew up some of the tracks. The first track tried 80PSI and the nozzle blew off the potato cannon and blew up the newspaper track. Pretty sweet. Next, we tried 40PSI on our track, and the same thing happened. Kind of an epic fail.
For fun, at the very end, we charged the tanks up to 120PSI and launched a wad of Duct Tape and foam through the hallway. The noise from the pressure release was so loud I'm surprised CSU PD wasn't called on us. We thoroughly cleaned off the top of all the pipes in that entire hallway.
Our structure ended up taking third (out of five) place, which was good for some candy.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) group on campus likes to do "improv design challenges" a few times during the semester. Basically they give us some pizza, and tell us a design challenge that we split into groups and need to complete in 30-45 minutes. There is always a winner that gets some sort of prize. This time, we had to create a structure from Duct Tape, newspaper, and a few wooden dowels that would allow a 1/4" steel ball bearing to complete a loop, powered by a potato cannon.
20PSI was used, and the gun didn't have enough power to do much, so this improv design kind of failed everyone. However, after we were all done, we played with some higher pressures and blew up some of the tracks. The first track tried 80PSI and the nozzle blew off the potato cannon and blew up the newspaper track. Pretty sweet. Next, we tried 40PSI on our track, and the same thing happened. Kind of an epic fail.
For fun, at the very end, we charged the tanks up to 120PSI and launched a wad of Duct Tape and foam through the hallway. The noise from the pressure release was so loud I'm surprised CSU PD wasn't called on us. We thoroughly cleaned off the top of all the pipes in that entire hallway.
Our structure ended up taking third (out of five) place, which was good for some candy.
