Stick bomb video short

Yesterday in Eng Design we had students make different kinds of stick bombs as a way to demonstrate structures held together by tension. I used a square configuration for my example.

I found it fairly straightforward to form a single square, but lengthening the chain was a challenge. I used a desk weight to help me isolate the early part of the build while I lengthened the chain. What I found was that I needed to place the cross pieces closer together than what I had seen in the instructions to keep the thing together.

You can tell from the video that my first drop attempt at triggering the stickbomb halted itself halfway through. You can also see why: it was the closeness of the cross pieces.

The later part of the stick bomb held together well (too well) because the tension was distributed over more pieces. In the video you only see two drops, but there was a drop in-between that didn’t trigger at all because of how sturdy the later half of the build was. Dropping it flat was ineffective at dismantling it; I had to drop it on its side.

Blog note: I wanted to test embedding a video as a header to this post so that I can also see what happens when I post the link to Facebook. The information about the video is added to the yml front matter of this post’s markdown file:

header:
  video:
    id: 3i_KQVjg-Gc
    provider: youtube