Today I did some more complex experiments. Firstly I made a way to topple an object inspired by a part of OK Go's machine. It worked although the bottle I used was probably not heavy enough to work in the way I wanted.



I wanted to make a see-saw so I glued two jars to a piece of card, with another jar acting as a pivot. When I poured water into one jar the see-saw toppled, but the card was a bit floppy, especially when it got wet.



I wanted to take the idea of using water a bit further, so I rigged some paint pots up to a basic pulley system, using easels as supports. This worked well with the water, but in the context of a whole machine I thought a solid weight would look better, so I placed another easel to feed a jar into one of the pots.



I found some sections of pipe in the classroom and I wanted to find a way to make them roll. I set up the tables at slants so the pipe would speed up and slow down at certain points. I used a swinging jar to start it going as I could use this in the final machine.




I saw a technique on a few videos where a swinging weight uncoils around a pole. I tried it with a poster tube I found, as this is definitely the kind of thing I could find in the Scrapstore. I used a wooden board as an example of how the machine could be carried on.