Mousetrap Car

2013 Words9 Pages
The purpose of this task is to create a mousetrap car and gain an understanding of how the car has demonstrated concepts associated with physics. There are a couple of physic concepts displayed including Newton’s law of motion, the law of conservation of energy, friction and air resistance. There were also many difficulties faced during the creation of the mousetrap car and many improvements may have been made. Newton’s first law of motion states that any object at rest will remain at rest, and a moving object will remain at constant velocity unless an unbalanced force acts on it. This is also known as the law of inertia. A string is attached to both the lever arm and the axle. When the rear axle is rotated in an anti clockwise direction,…show more content…
This included the axles not moving. In the beginning, vinyl pipe was chose as the prop to connect the axles to the car, however there was no success with this initial plan. To connect the axles to the car, vinyl pipes was chosen although that plan had failed. Furthermore, it was difficult for us to connect the front wheels to the chassis. It resulted in choosing to redesigning and building the car again. Holes were drilled into the wood rather than using a vinyl pipe to connect the axles. Before reconstructing the whole car again, another problem experienced was the wheels moving, yet the car didn’t. This problem was overcome by increasing the traction between the wheels and the floor. The traction was increased by adding paint on the circular edges of the wheels. At one stage, the car was unable to move because the string was stuck. The strings had to be changed to a different material to avoid this situation from constantly occurring. The new string used is fishing lines. While trialling the mousetrap car, the lever arm made out of bamboo snapped. The bamboo lever arm was replaced with a fishing rod. The fishing rod was attached securely by using cable ties. The axles and wheels kept moving out of place while trialling the car. To stop it from moving, holes are drilled between where the we want it to move and stuck a toothpick in. A toothpick was chosen instead of a nail because it had a lighter weight. A piece of vinyl pipe was also placed in-between the wheels and the axles holes to leave an even gap. A problem which was not able to be solved was the car not driving in a straight path. The problem was discovered quite late and nothing could be done. The reason for this problem was because there was a slight error when drilling the hole. A reason balsa craft wood was not used was due to the fact that the wood kept splitting when cutting or drilling. The wood had split
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