Our Design -- Single Column, Double Support
We used straws, cardboard, clay, and hot glue to build our sign. At first we were aiming to build a double, double sign, but we were steadily running out of straws and money. Our teacher gave us $50,000 to build our structure with. We figured out a scale factor before we built it. We measured the straws to the scaled down version of the sign and cut them to size. Then we hot glued them together. We formed a lot of small triangles in the columns and support bar for stability. We also added a suspension bar to further support the sign. When we were done with the structure we put clay down around the sign to ‘cement’ it down. We reinforced that with hot glue. Our real life model (that doesn't exist) is supposed to be 30 feet in height and 15 feet in length. We were sneaky and did not need to build a 40 cm wide sign because cars can go under a sign that's stationed on just one side of the road. Our structure turned out to be extremely strong and flexible. It held 634 grams of weight! The only problem we ran into was money. By the end of the project, we had no money left. Next time we need to be more conscientious of our finances.