Side View
For all of the sketches it was very important to have the measurements exact. The hardest thing to draw nicely was the mechanism. It is so complicated to draw and we had to make sure that the drawings matched the materials we were planning to use.
Front View
Again, it was important to know the exact size of every individual piece of our prototypes so that the final product would be very accurate.
Top View
The careful measurements and multiple revisions of our sketches were really useful in helping us make a neat and functioning crossbow.
The biggest challenge in building the prototype was making it stay together and look nice at the same time. We used a lot of duct tape in our first prototype and it looks really tacky. However, this is our only fully functional crossbow. The mechanism is completely built. And it works pretty well.
Greek Invention Project
This is a crossbow that I made with a group in class. It was part of a Greek invention project that helped us to understand how beneficial the Greeks were to modern society.
There were a lot of changes we had to make from the prototype to the actual thing. The main difference is that the wood is a lot thicker and we had to spend more time working on making it perfect. We also learned a lot about power tools. One not so smart thing that we did is break the tip of a jigsaw off. The reason that we did that actually has to do with physics. You can not turn the saw a lot because of something called "torque" which Mr. Major explained to us. Because the saw piece is so long it is very easy to break when it gets tipped.
There were a lot of changes we had to make from the prototype to the actual thing. The main difference is that the wood is a lot thicker and we had to spend more time working on making it perfect. We also learned a lot about power tools. One not so smart thing that we did is break the tip of a jigsaw off. The reason that we did that actually has to do with physics. You can not turn the saw a lot because of something called "torque" which Mr. Major explained to us. Because the saw piece is so long it is very easy to break when it gets tipped.