Engineering Competition

The competition for Tom’s engineering project was at the High School this evening. Here are Tom and his partner Matt arriving at the scene.

One of the rules is that the machine had to fit into the box while it was impounded. That means that some assembly was required. As you can see in this picture, that involved quite a bit of duct tape.

Unfortunately a few bits got broken while that machine was being transported. Most importantly, one of the leads broke off one of the motors. The single remaining motor didn’t have enough power to drive the machine on its own, and we hadn’t packed anything useful like a soldering iron. But the two of them came up with clever bodges for each of the problems and got it all running in about 10 minutes. When the judges came to their table, it put on a pretty good show.

It wasn’t perfect, but it scored 89 out of 100 on its second run, which was better than a lot of the other machines that were there.