Wooden Tower Contest

CTE Competencies met during this project:
1. Demonstrate positive work ethic.
3. Demonstrate Teamwork Skills
7. Demonstrate creativity and resourcefulness.
10. Demonstrate critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.
11. Demonstrate healthy behaviors and safety skills.
15. Demonstrate time-, task-, and resource-management skills.
16. Demonstrate job-specific mathematics skills.
18. Demonstrate proficiency with technologies common to a specific occupation.
21. Demonstrate telecommunications skills.
31. Analyze a specific product/process/system, using the Universal Systems Model.
44. Design a construction system to solve a problem.
46. Analyze the cause of a failure or a problem in a technological system.

Objective:
To design and construct the most efficient 4-sided tower possible that holds 20+ textbooks. Efficiency will be calculated by weight held ÷ weight of the tower.

Tower Requirements

Width Your tower must not be wider than 5 inches at any given span. Remember, if you make all sides 5 inches, when you glue them together, two sides will be greater than 5 inches in width.

Height Your tower must be between 5 and 7 inches tall.

Your tower must have 4 sides, and only 4 sides. Your sides must be identical. You must make a top sturdy enough to hold a text book.

You will only use wood glue to put this tower together.

You may not have solid walls. Your fingers must be able to fit through the sides of your tower. There will be no solid base or top to your tower.

Steps in construction:
1. Draw 3 thumbnail sketches of the side of your tower.
2. On a blank piece of paper, draw a full scale drawing of your tower and show to Mr. Cornwell before he will give you wood.

Tape the corners of your paper down to a construction board. Cover the paper with wax paper and tape down. You will be gluing the joints of the truss together. (DO NOT glue the entire piece or wood to the wax paper!) Use a few pins or tape to keep parts touching while gluing if needed.

Once each side dries, give to Mr. Cornwell for storage until all 4 sides are done.

You may use a highlighter to go over your design.

Tape your design down. Then tape a piece of wax paper over your design. Glue the pieces together. Do not glue the sticks to the wax paper. The paper will be peeled off. Use pins if needed.

Angled cuts are called miter joints. Notice the gaps in the joints in the center. These will be much weaker than the joints than the side pictured above.

How strong is your wood glue?

The wood glue we use will hold 1600 lbs per square inch if the wood joint is glued correctly. This means if we are using 1/4" pieces, the glue will hold 400 lbs per square inch.

If there are gaps, the strength of the glue goes down dramatically and will only hold one third of the full capacity. This means if you have solid glue for a 1/4" it will hold 133 lbs.