Bridge Design

I can't believe it's already Thursday. One more week and I will be done with classes. Totally done with undergraduate classes. I can't even begin to think about what that means. But... I also have a lot to do between now and then. And I really should be working on all those things instead of blogging. But a few really exciting things happened this week so I feel like I need to write about them in order to calm down.

First of all, there was the bridge design. One of our projects for our senior design class was to build a footbridge that is about 2ft by 5ft and can hold 1 ton (2000lb) of weight. On Wednesday, we tested our designs. There were 8 teams. We all came up with different designs. And amazingly, the tests went very efficiently and everyone's bridges held up.

This is my team and our bridge. The concrete blocks were a total of 2000lb. We had enough confidence in our bridge to stand on it after loading it with so much weight. We worked pretty hard on this thing. We picked the design for its asthetics mainly. I drew it on Google Sketchup using the CAD skills I learned over the summer. The drawings were really helpful during construction because each one of the diagonal pieces needed 6 different cuts. And when we were putting it all together, nothing fit. We had a few panic moments trying to cut and move each piece so that they fit well together. And some of our wood were not straight so we had to work around that.

This is the bridge upside down. Anyway, we're all really proud of how well our bridges performed. And it was really nice to be doing this in front of the Student Center. A lot of people stopped by and watched, wondering what was going on. It's just nice to have something to show after all these psets, calculations, and classes.