In a recent project in my physics class, our teacher instructed us to build a mousetrap powered vehicle that can travel at least one meter off of a table. We were only allowed to use basic materials and all the vehicle's power had to come from a mousetrap. The hard part about this project was finding a design. Most high school mousetrap car projects focus on a simpler distance-based challenge, where students build vehicles that can travel for the most distance. There are plenty of these distance designs on the Internet, but not many for the table style challenge. Instead of building a traditional mousetrap car, I wanted to do something different. I felt that a regular car would either break on impact with the ground or have a hard time maintaining momentum after the drop from the table. In my design process, I attempted to come up with the simplest design I could that had the lowest amount of moving parts. In the end, I came up with the idea to attach a mousetrap to the bottom of a ball and basically just launch it off the edge of the table. The potential energy stored in the mousetrap would be used to make the ball jump off the table where it would roll on the ground. I settled on using a ball made of floral foam that I bought at Target. The foam was stiff but easy to cut with a knife. I first began carving out space for the mousetrap to sit in. The difficult part about this process was making sure that the mousetrap was fairly flush with the ball so that the roll wouldn't be affected too much. It took some sanding to get the perfect fit. Next, I used superglue to secure the mousetrap. I tested my contraption at school the next day. It worked pretty well, but on my last test run, the mousetrap fell out of the ball. I decided to add some hot glue along with applying more super glue. Additionally, I applied a lot of duct tape around the circumference of the ball to make sure the mousetrap never popped out again. I did some more testing and my revisions seemed to have been successful. On the actual day of the competition, my ball went about 2.5 meters (measured from the edge of the table to the closest side of the ball). Most people in my class were surprised to see a foam ball brought into class when they had all built traditional mousetrap cars. Click here for photos.
