Balsa wood bridge building software

Measure and cut a 14 inch piece of balsa wood and label it the base. Midwest products has been selling balsa wood for a long time, and they. Use lap joints whenever possible to get the best strength. Balsa wood bridges software free download balsa wood bridges.

Best method for building balsawood bridge stack exchange. If any of your sticks dont have any brown veins at all, save yourself the headache and just throw it away. A gold mine of links and resources to model bridge building related websites. Besides the glue and a sharp cutting blade, students will need approximately 30 sticks each 61 cm or 2 ft in length. Since the bridges are statically indeterminate, using fea software is the only way to do this and get useful results, explains marc. More than just the types of trusses and the importance of triangular supports, it is a way to learn about the inevitable tradeoffs. A balsa wood bridgebuilding project touches on principles of. This bridges uses a combination of end and lap joints. I remember making a balsa wood tower for a competition many years ago.

The more dark brown veins you see in the wood, the more dense it is. Balsa wood bridge design and construction by ceres software corporation. Here is a bridge using the k truss design made from balsa wood. Im working on building a balsa bridge now, but i love computer modeling first. These are the same design principles that i use when building model bridges. How to design your model bridge from start to finish garretts. At the top and bottom chords, the joint is a lap joint. Construction to speed up the construction of the bridge. These bridge building tips will give you a head start when you start designing and building your model bridges. Modelsmart is a new software program designed to introduce middle, high school and college students to basic engineering concepts while reinforcing their math and science skills. I used nails to make a jig, but youll also need some 1412 scrap pieces of balsa wood to pad the nails so they do not make an impression into the wood. Balsa wood bridge project with accelerated bridge construction techniques this activity can be done in a number of ways. Written by a professional engineer, modelsmart allows students to interactively design and test balsa and bass wood structural models of bridges, cranes, towers, and all kinds of structural systems on the computer. This website is a free program that allows you to design a virtual truss.

The bridges will be modeled and optimized using the online modeling software. A direct link to the materials for this video can be. You can download a free program called the bridge designer which allows you to. Students test their wood bridge building skills with fea simscale. This was a project for my shop class to design a balsa wood bridge that could have the highest efficiency rate. While there is an evaluation component to the contest, the primary aim is for students to experiment with materials, in this case balsa wood and glue, and learn about structure and strength. Building a simplified balsa wood model of a bridge is a way to learn about the many issues important to the design of real civil engineering projects.

Although the video begins after the test starts, and cuts out the bridge had. Balsa wood bridges by ceres software corporation jembatan. The bridge students will build uses balsa wood sticks 2. To prevent this, cut the balsa wood by pulling the knife toward you similar to cutting a steak with a knife. My company had a bridge building contest for engineers week. Im building a bridge out of balsawood strips for school, and wanted some advice. Balsa wood bridge building instructions figure 1 figure 2 figure 3. You can see that where the slanted members of each k join together at the vertical member, there is an end joint. Ginos bridge, based on his successful structure design from his entry in his physics 11 year.