Scioly.org

Hey everybody.
I decided to start a discussion for the new elevated bridge event. I had done boomilever for the last 2 years, along with bridge building the three years in division B before that. So i was planning on doing this next year.

I looked at the draft rules for this year. in a way it's sort of a mix of towers and bridge, so the best designs will use the combination of both i'd assume. possible other designs would be the "A" frame bridges, although that might work better for division B rules than in C. and this would also be a good year for using arches.

anybody have any thoughts on this event? (i guess this could be for both division C and B)

I have built towers and boomilevers in the past 2 years, but not bridges. Are there any crucial ideas about them that I should understand?

well i find them much easyer then towers at least the ones i desinged umm try some denser balsa for the peices conecting the two main side that helped me alot im not sure bout anything else

I think I'm going to try my first few bridges in bass so I get a feel of what it can hold and what it should be like before I start doing balsa. With balsa, I feel its going to break because of the inconsistency in the wood before its going to break because of a design flaw.

I've already tried buliding an elevated bridge just to get the hang of it and see what it was like. I built mine out of chopsticks and superglue.

tehkubix wrote:I think I'm going to try my first few bridges in bass so I get a feel of what it can hold and what it should be like before I start doing balsa. With balsa, I feel its going to break because of the inconsistency in the wood before its going to break because of a design flaw.

That's an intriguing idea! Do your structures get insanely strong upon using all that bass? Or do they just emphasize vulnerable/weak areas in the design?

Aia wrote:

tehkubix wrote:I think I'm going to try my first few bridges in bass so I get a feel of what it can hold and what it should be like before I start doing balsa. With balsa, I feel its going to break because of the inconsistency in the wood before its going to break because of a design flaw.

That's an intriguing idea! Do your structures get insanely strong upon using all that bass? Or do they just emphasize vulnerable/weak areas in the design?

yes, that is actually a very good idea. balsa in general is a lot more inconsistent than bass, although i hand select and test each piece before i buy it, so i don't usually have that problem as much. I'm lucky enough i guess to have a hobby shop near by that has a great selection of wood and sizes (of bass, balsa, spruce, cherry, etc) and it was always good quality. The owner called me "that boomilever kid" cuz i went in there so much. but i guess i can't be the boomilever kid next year =O.. guess i'll have to settle for the bridge boy.

My coach gets all of our wood.. He doesn't usually bring a scale or anything, and we tend to have a lot of wood left over. too bad we cant return it, that would be awesome! Maybe 'exchange' it??

haha.. i wish you could "exchange" it... my division B coach always bought big packs of wood. but in a pack of like 50 sticks only like 10 of them were any good. so instead of wasting so much, now i buy it on my own at the hobby shop.

i've came up with several designs, that i like. so we'll see how much i still like them after i build them. i'll prolly be doing that sometime soon.

I built an elevated bridge about a week ago according to the new specs. Based on my resulting structure, I'm guessing this event will be pretty difficult. I want to use a tension member to connect the distal ends so badly!

I have not tested it yet.... but as soon as my Scioly team meets up (3wks probably) I'll test it then. Has anyone else started building?