Day 2: The Continued Preparation

Introduction

Hello bloggers of the internet! Welcome back to the building of the Truss bridge. On our second day, we continued to build more parts necessary for the bridge. Today we will be making tubes that are 30 cm long and have 10 mm sides. Then we will be also making gussets which are parts that connect the bridge. To get a better understanding of them, look at the picture below! 

The spots labeled A, B, C, and D on the are the gussets. The job that they do is hold together the beams that make up the support for the bridge. We will be needing four of each gusset.

More Processing

Continuing the process of building more parts for the bridge, we started using more CAREFUL measurements to cut out each individual tube. We will be needing four sides of 10 mm width and one side of 6 mm width. The 6 mm width will be handy later. We marked the first four spots at 10 mm and then the fifth at 6 mm so that we can easily bend the paper at the lines while following the marks. After finishing the marks, we CAREFULLY cut out the piece by cutting at the line marked at 6 mm (or 46 if you add in the 4 10 mm marks). Then, we took the 6 mm edge, folded it under the opposite 10 mm side and glued it together. We continued this process for the next three tubes and they came out to look like the picture below!

The four tubes, each with 30 cm length and 10 mm width.

Now with these four tubes cut, glued, and completed, we heartily moved on to the gussets! Using the paper of the bridge above, we traced each individual gusset onto the manila folder and then CAREFULLY cut out each piece. After a long and tedious task, we received our final product which can be seen in the picture below!

Four of each gusset as shown above.

Moving Forward

Our next day in class we will be constructing each side of the bridge by combing all of the parts that we toiled to measure and cut to make the sides. Stay tuned for more! You know you want to.