Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Snow Bridge

Initially our group wanted to make a series of pointed arches out of bricks of hardened snow. We planned to make the bricks out of a bucket mold and then carve the bricks down to the size and shape we needed them to be. When we got to class on Monday we realized we were a team member short, so we had to work our hardest and see how much work we could get done. In class we got 7 bricks, 2 keystones, and 3 bases all constructed. With the crew we had we were not able to make enough bricks to make the extra arches, so we decided we would settle for one really good arch instead of rushing 3. We left the bricks to solidify, since they were still quite slushy. We returned Monday night and constructed the arch out of the hardened bricks. We used the stakes as supports and used a slushy snow mortar to pack in between the bricks to help them join to each other. We finished constructing the arch, brick by brick, and used them all because one was dropped during the process. Luckily we planned ahead and had constructed an extra just in case this had happened. One of the keystones ended up not solidifying successfully and the other did not fit properly so we had to carve the actual keystone out of the backup base we had made using one of the tubs. We left for the night with the structure still supported with the stakes (Picture 1). We came in on Tuesday morning and removed the supports (Picture 2). The arch was very sturdy and had a nice minimalistic feel, but the pointed arch concept was not going to become a reality because of the thinness of the keystone. We spent the rest of Tuesday attempting to pack snow on the sides to give it a smoother and cleaner feel. The snow was fluffy and very difficult to pack though, so we had quite a problem doing this. We ended up making a slush mixture and packing it on the sides. We used a ruler to carve this to a good curve and we used knives to even out the bricks on the inside in to a smooth arch. We finished our snow bridge and cleaned off the two bases and tried to remove all the dirt we could. We were satisfied with our bridge and liked the simplistic and elegant feel of our arch (Pictures 3 and 4).





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