Mouse Trap Car Distance Competition
For this project I worked alone to construct a vehicle that could use the potential energy found in a mouse trap spring to travel as far a distance as possible. For the first few days of the project everyone researched the best ways to make their cars. Some things people looked at were friction, inertia, different materials, and how many wheels they should have. After I was done researching ways to build my car I started fabrication. I decided to use a three wheel design with a long release arm. My car was a fairly light design compared to some of the other vehicles, this made it fairly easy for the long arm to move the car. I decide to make the frame out of small pieces of wood that were provided to us. I did't want to overbuild my design and make it too heavy, so I took the pieces we were provided and cut them in half. This was one of the reasons that the design was so light and fast.
On competition day the vehicle went 45', my goal for the car was for it to go 40 feet. I tried again, but this time I pushed the arm back even farther than the first run. This change in tactics caused a shorter run of 42 feet, I believe this was caused by the arm not being strong enough to hold the strain of the bent back spring.