On this project my partner and I used our skill and we had construct 2 different truss, and one custom truss. We used balsa wood to build the trusses and that was hard due to the glue and the weight of the wood. Then we had to see how the trusses held up under the forces of gravity and see what it took to break the truss.
Triangle Truss
Square/Triangle Truss
Custom Truss
Decision Matrix
Custom Truss
Challenges
The challenges that we had when building the truss was gluing. We had a more complicated design but the pieces were to small to glue so we had to use larger pieces. Some constraints we had were only using 36 inches of balsa wood and we could only have a certain height so that it could fit the testing machine.(Im sorry i couldn't record this in my note book i forgot)
Failure
Failure occurred due to the fact of using balsa wood and the design of the truss. it was to big and wasn't stable enough to support the weight of 41n. Also we should of added more support to the inside and maybe used a protractor to get some spot on measurements. If we could resign the truss we would of went with the original design of that we had and spend more time on gluing it. We would of went with the original deign but we were limited on time if we had more i would of done a lot better. By building a pyramid because that is the most structurally sound shape in the world the design would of looked like this.