Trust the Truss!
You might have already heard about Skiddaw’s amazing work building structures from spaghetti and marshmallows. Well, today they’ve taken it to the next level, using a range of engineering techniques to create our very own truss bridges!
We started by looking at simple paper bridges, and saw that just by changing the shape of the paper we could make our bridges much more rigid. Next, we looked for inspiration in buildings across the world. We examined the shapes that crop up again and again in tall, strong buildings and found that triangles are used very often because they are such a strong shape!
Using what we had learned, we had a go at building our very own truss bridges. Check out the results below!
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- A traditional truss bridge
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- A bridge with its own triangular supports
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- A lovely pedestrian footbridge.
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- This one comes with a roadway for cars!
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- Lots of tape for our prototypes…
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- We ran out of room in the weight bucket before the bridge showed any signs of breaking…
