Re: Bridge Contests

[brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>]

At 11:29 8/22/97 -0600, Larry Smith wrote:
....
> When I was in high school the local university (Brigham Young University)
> began such bridge building contests.  They ran them at the university for
> the engineering students and also took their bridge breaking (and load
> testing) apparatus around to the high schools for contests there as well.
> (I must parenthetically say that although my bridges held greater loads
> each year my ranking dropped each year as my classmates improved more than
> I did.)

I am so bold as to imagine that when you are 65 and world-weary, you
will still be able to provide at the drop of a hat, three effective ways 
of beefing up a center-loaded beam.  That would be the kind of learning
one could wish for physics students.



> Anyway, the university sold pre-packaged kits for a couple of bucks that
> had the cardboard bridge deck, two small square base blocks, some long thin
> sticks of balsa wood, and a tube of airplane glue.  The kits were all
> supposed to be uniform (but sometimes we'd buy two kits and try to combine
> the best sticks into the equivalent of one kit).
>
> > The criterion could reasonably be
> > load at failure   divided by notional cost of components.
>
> Since I was in high school the rules have changed slightly to where the
> winner isn't merely the bridge that holds the greatest load, but the
> greatest load divided by the weight of the bridge.

I expect you saw the note from Paul Namkcih   - apologies if i'm
wrongly inferring his name from his email address - who mentioned the URL for
IIT's bridge-making rules, as follows:

http://www.iit.edu/~hsbridge/

They too, are using the quotient of load at failure by mass
(Mass serves as a very usable proxy for cost in engineering
 works of this kind)
> I imagine that the appropriate engineering departments at BYU could give
> you specs on their kits (or the source of them).
>
> HTH,
> Larry


Sounds like a helpful tip. I must also mention MIT who have raised this
contest style creativity to a work of art.

Regards


brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK