EOH Mousetrap Car

Hey guys and girls, welcome back to my blog. For the past few weeks, I was working on a mousetrap car to put in a competition at the U of I. I was working in a team of three with two of my best friends. We made many prototypes, 5 in total. Our first one was just a trial, like throwing things at a wall and seeing what stuck. We made a simple car much like everything you see online. However, when the spring was loaded and the arm was up, the string snapped and the arm came down with tremendous force, snapping the entire body of the mousetrap in half.  In our next prototype, we still used balsa wood, but we changed the type of string to fishing line, because of how much stronger it is. We made it longer and used wood for our arm on the car. For our third prototype, we used plywood. We could not cut this with our hands, however, so we needed a laser cutter. However, we had tilted wheels at this point and it was going everywhere. We thought our fourth prototype would be our final one, because of the gear mechanism inside it, but we made one final one. The gearbox could keep the car small and light while still maximizing the power and distance possible. We modeled this car after a drag racer, as you can see from the bigger rear wheels and the slanted position. We used wire at first to secure it to the body, but then we started to use zip-ties because they are stronger and easier to use. On the final model, we used many of the same concepts as the 4th one, but made it almost entirely of legos, making it a lot lighter than using plywood. 

Today, on competition day at the U of I, there was a multitude of buildings to go through, finding different projects all over campus for the EOH. My personal favorite was the solar car parked outside of the Electrical Engineering building. It was built to be able to go from Nebraska to Oregon without any fuel besides the sun. Wow! But at our competition, there was a lot more waiting than there was actually doing things about our mousetrap car. We took our cars upstairs to the testing hallways, ran them three times, and then went back down to present to the judges. For the awards, we were given the best presentation award. Our school had gotten that for many years in a row now, so we were extremely happy about that.

That is it about the 2019 EOH Mousetrap Car Competition. I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, tell someone about my blog. If you hated it, complain to someone, and maybe they will come to my website (hehe)! See you guys next time!