Designing Philip 3

We kept our triangle design, but instead of making it out of plastic, we used balsa wood. Balsa wood is much lighter and not as flimsy as the previous material we were using. 

The materials we used:

• a coathanger
• 3 CDs
• 6 beads
• 1 meter of balsa wood
• 1 meter of thinner balsa wood
• styrofoam take-out box
• Bertucci's take-out box
• a bottle cap
• lots of glue

In this model of Philip, we did our best to use the lightest materials we could find, but also keep the car working efficiently. Once we crafted the balsa wood body, we ran into a big problem. The balloon kept interfering with the turning of the wheels. We came up with a pretty simple way of fixing this by making small roof-like guards of styrofoam over each wheel. Now, the balloon can fit nicely in between the pieces of styrofoam. We noticed that the pieces of pipe were interfering with the spinning of the wheels as well. To fix this, we put a piece of plastic over the hole in each CD wheel, punched a small hole in each piece of plastic and used bits of a coathanger as axles. To hold the wheels on, we put a small beat on either side of the wheel. To the back of the car, we connected a bottle cap with a hole in it to manage how much air was being let out of the balloon. At the end, we were really excited (and nervous) to see how Philip 3 preformed.

We figured that the car stopped short because the hole in the bottle cap was too small. Once we made the hole bigger...

We are ready for Trial 1. :)