Anomaly91 Posted October 9, 2007 Report Share Posted October 9, 2007 Hey! For a sort of physics competition, our teacher has asked us to make a mousetrap car, but with some strange specifications. Rather than have it go as fast or as far as we can, she wants it to travel 3 meters in exactly 3 seconds. The car will also have a stretch of 1 m prior to the start of timing in which it will be able to accelerate to whatever speed you want. So far my team has come up with a few ideas, such as just completely overloading the amount of power needed and then adding a system of gears to slow the car down to the necessary point, but the problem that we have encountered with this is that the car seems to go a little too slowly with any gears added. Another suggestion was just to keep modifying the length of the mousetrap arm and position of the mousetrap until we got the desired speed, but we found that not only did this not give reliable speeds, but they really didn't yeild precise results. I was wondering what ideas you guys had on the subject! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
modest Posted October 9, 2007 Report Share Posted October 9, 2007 If you want to take the mythbusters approach (quickest and simplest solution is best) You could make the car complete the course faster than it should - then just add weight to the car in increments until the time is perfect. What kind of speed limiting system did you have in mind? Something centrifugal? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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