Wednesday, February 17, 2010

The Snow Bridge











For our bridge, we went with the typical arch idea and decided that our best bet would be to make molds over the week in order to freeze the blocks for our bridge. We packed snow and water into the blocks, hoping they would freeze overnight, but we had no luck. Onto the next idea.. On Monday during class we decided just to pack more snow in the molds and put a little bit of water in them, instead of the other way around. This idea worked. We filled the molds halfway and then started stacking them in an Egyptian like fashion. By the end of the class period, we decided that we needed to build another mold, this time a troth, as we were going to fill it with ice and use it for the top piece of the arch, as support and a connecting piece. We headed back out to the field and 6 Monday night and finished the basic structure of the bridge. Our plan was to let the troth of water freeze over night and during class on Tuesday, we would spend our time making the bridge look presentable and asthetically pleasing.


Tuesday morning we got to class to discover the troth full of water did not freeze as well as we had hoped. Yet again, we quickly had to come up with a new plan. We started building smaller blocks from our molds and decided that was our only hope to complete the bridge, even if it didn't hold the weight, we knew the bridge would look good. As the morning went on, the opening of the bridge started to slant, we liked the idea of making it look asymmetrical, so we went with it. By 10:00 a.m., on Tuesday, we finished our bridge. We added the final keystone and covered it all in ice, hoping that it would be able to hold the 100 pound minimum.


At 10:30, we started critique, our bridge felt strong, although it didn't look strong. It did look nice though, and unique. Finally it was our turn to be critiqued...and to everyone's surprise, Ben climbed on it and it held him!








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