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Monday, May 24, 2010

Final Exam Blogs

Nick Comosa-C Block:
Our most recent project was our potato cannon. This was an idea constructed by Mr. Joslin himself in order to demonstrate to the class the combustion cycle which was taught during the mechanical engineering part of the year. This was a group effort due to "financial struggles". All groups presented their proposal and a combination of the best was chosen. The final product resulted in having a 5 ft. barrel, and a 2 ft. combustion chamber. It was spray painted a GORGEOUS camouflage on the barrel thanks to an anonymous member of the class. When tested, the final product shot a potato approximately 150 yards up on KENNEDY FIELD. This project taught us about the combustion cycle and also taught us how to make a self defense weapon. This project was informative, educational, and awesome and should be done for years to come.
Another project that we did this year was the bridge project. This was another project that was very educational and fun to learn from. We were given a limited amount of supplies and were forced to construct a bridge out of a limited amount of balsa wood, that would hold 20 newtons of sand. We had constraints such as length and width, but other than that construction was forced to be creative and investigations were forced to be done in order to learn about the best sorts of support systems and trusses. I personally used the K-truss support system and although it wasn't apparent to the eye, it did very well with holding the sand. I am not positive but i believe it held up to 55 newtons of sand. This project taught us about civil engineering and what many of their jobs consist of. It also taught us which bridge trusses are the most effective and why. This project, along with the potato cannon project, should absolutely be done next year as well. They were fun and we all learned a lot. Thanks for a great year. Hook it up with a good grade please !!

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