Lego Car

We began by playing with our lego car and today we really began to focus. We had a preliminary set up for our car that looked like this:

We used the big red gear to reduce the speed quickly. This would also increase torque. Using one big gear instead of more little gears would eliminate unnecessary friction. The only problem with the big gear is that we have to maneuver our axles. As you can see, we have a mini axle to the right so that the gears though but don't interfere. We timed this across the table with out the weight and it came out to about 11 seconds for one yard- pretty slow. I think it had a 1:81 ratio. 

In our next iteration we got rid of the red gear. We tried putting the gears at an angle (instead of only putting axles on a horizontal plane moving them up and down) but it didn't really work. We also tried to keep the car balanced by having the axles run all the way across. This would better support the gears and prevent them from wiggling.  This one was able to go one yard in about 6 seconds, so that was quite an improvement. 
This design has a 1:27 reduction ratio and was our final design. It took about 8-10 seconds to run the course with the weight. After completing this we experimented. We tried reducing the gears more by adding another 1:3 ration to the end of the gear box. This slowed our car down by about a second and a half. 

Final Car:

Wrap up:

The higher gear ratios (smaller numbers along the y axis) (probably not the best way to graph this but...)  tended to have higher times.

Eve found her Wall-E!