Design Journal - Day 9

December 6th, 2018

Day 9 Journal

By: Simon Zhang

We noticed a problem while building the pinball launcher, the wood used to build the base of launcher was too grainy that a chip was caused when we were making a hole. According to Newton's law if the contact surface between two objects is more grainy, more friction would be caused; less friction would be reduced if the contact surface is smooth. As a result, we could not move the pinball launcher side by side correctly because the friction caused by the chip was greater than the force produced by us. Here is a picture of a cube made from the same type of wood, as one can see, this type of wood causes a lot of chipping. We made cubes also today at Lee J's place, but because of the chipping as show in the picture below, we figured we had to remake them.

To solve the problem we only had one solution: To get new smooth wood from a hardware store in order to reproduce the four sides of the base. This a milestone because although we had a problem, we found a way to solve, which is to replace the four sides of the base because the two sides that has the chipped holes are connected to the other two sides, so its better to replace all to make them the same type of wood.