Week4 studio journal

Week 4 - Studio Journal For this week's studio, we went to work shop to construct a ‘bridge’. The bridge has to be designed to bear big loan as possible. Thus, we should consider different aspects about the bridge such like which side has bigger ability of load-bearing, how to construct different material in order to gain the highest stress and which kinds of nails are the most suitable....

The teacher have introduced the materials for us and also illustrated the best way to use the tools. For example, the ply has a bigger load-bearing when it was set in vertical side which means the lateral side of ply stood on table but it was easier to reflect. For the hammer, it's better to hold the bottom in order to exert all strength. And also when cutting pine by saw, we should slant the saw and use arm to pull and push it. That was very interesting and useful skill for us to construct our bridges.

Then my group started to design our bridges. The left one it's our first idea that put the two plies on the pine and then use nails to staple them. However, we found that the centre might be not strong enough so we changed to build the right one. The right design was to staple two plies on each side of pines and then use the lateral side in order to gain the best load-bearing ability.

This was the final bridge we built. We could see the number of nails were different in the top and bottom side that's because we thought the top side needed more nails to bear load. And the nails in the centre of the bridge should be denser.

In addition, we also consider which types of nails were more suitable for us and they were also different in top and bottom side.

These were other groups' bridges. They use the idea of triangle which was the most stable structure to construct the bridges. That was pretty good but the center seemed not strong enough.

Then we began to text the loan-bearing of our bridges.

The space between my group's bridge and the machine was 28cm. Then we started to turn around the machine.

During the process, we could see the bridge has broken gradually. Firstly, the two plies were apart from the pines in the center position. And then it extended to the end side.

Lastly, the centre of the bridge was broken. We could find the rift on the pines and plies.

Finally the load-bearing of my group's bridge was about 530 which was high I think.

The experiment has illustrated for construction, we should consider many aspects like the choose of materials, the load-bearing ability and so on. We could also get some information from the rift position which showed the weakest place of things.