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brayden box wrote:It was my first bridge i had ever built, i built it two years ago.

That explains the score, then...

Unome wrote:

brayden box wrote:It was my first bridge i had ever built, i built it two years ago.

That explains the score, then...

Still impressive for a first. My first balsa builds, back when the event was Boomilever, were stuck at efficiencies of 200-300, anything above 500 was pure luck and wasn't going to happen again. For future bridges, try to lower weight. You might realize bass isn't necessary since even if it is stiff, it adds a lot of weight. And as someone said earlier you don't want a too strong bridge that never breaks. You do want it to break at around 15kgs, otherwise you have excess support that doesn't need to be there, possible weight saved.

Well I built a bridge just for fun, I am intrigued by the rules this year.

Weight: 5.45g
Load: 4.73kg
Score: 868
Division: B

Not very impressive, but I was trying out a lot of new things. It is the first SO bridge for me in about 5 years.

I made a bridge that weighed 5.6 grams and held 11.6 kg with a efficiency of 2071

20arana wrote:I made a bridge that weighed 5.6 grams and held 11.6 kg with a efficiency of 2071

Great work! Which division are you competing in?

I'm not sure why... if it is that the builders are yet another year more experienced, or that the elevated end somehow makes the challenge easier, but it seems that the early scores are much higher and much more repeatably consistent this year... Any others seeing anything similar?

dholdgreve wrote:I'm not sure why... if it is that the builders are yet another year more experienced, or that the elevated end somehow makes the challenge easier, but it seems that the early scores are much higher and much more repeatably consistent this year... Any others seeing anything similar?

Here in Georgia I'm noticing consistently lower scores than I expected (I have yet to see a bridge cross 1200 in either division) despite there being so many early competitions (then again, Georgia is strange).

Mass of Bridge: 8.7g
Load Supported: Max load (15kg)
Efficiency: 1724.14
Division: C

dholdgreve wrote:I'm not sure why... if it is that the builders are yet another year more experienced, or that the elevated end somehow makes the challenge easier, but it seems that the early scores are much higher and much more repeatably consistent this year... Any others seeing anything similar?

I'd say it's the former. I think the reason is not necessarily that the test support makes the problem easier, but the fact that it doesn't really change the design of the bridges. Thus, people who already did bridge building last year have a general idea of how to adjust the designs slightly. And people doing this event for the first time need only look at pictures from last year to get a good start.

Anyways, I helped coordinate the bridge building event at an NJ regional. I will say that in general, the teams that did the best generally had the same designs as last year. If anyone wants more details, hmu.

At our first tournament this past year, we used the same design as last year.

Last year our design had an efficiency ~500. It weighed 16g and held roughly half of the weight.

We used heavier bass for the first competition this year (actually on accident) and it weighed 21g but held all of the weight, giving us an efficiency ~700.

I am not sure if that means our design was better suited to slightly elevated bridges, or some other part of it. We are back to using the correct, thinner bass wood at our next competition in a couple weeks, so we shall hopefully get it lighter with a similar 14-ish kg load.