Networks: Begin building

We got all the materials and began fully building today. We decided to put making the engines a priority today because Tim and I can't finalise the rails unless we know what the stirling engine design is, to make the connections work properly from engine to rail.

We managed to source our final materials as well. As mentioned in my previous post we found a design that we could make more easily, however, Ben still wanted to make the one we originally planned on making. So Edrian will take care of making the simpler one tonight while we start on the original one today.


We read through the instructions many times to make sure that we understood what we were supposed to do.


Once the cans were cut I filed down the sharp edges so that it won't be so easy to cut yourself on them.


Here Ben's seeing if the template we corrected is right for the can.


Edrian and Tim helped to saw some chocolate blocks in half.

Personally, I think it would be more efficient to go straight into building the simpler one because it would save a lot of time and would have less trouble. But when you're in a group you need to know when to object and when to let people go ahead and do their own thing.

The instructions for the original were confusing, but I heard from Ben and Edrian that in the end they broke the firebox they were making by accident. So they'll try again tomorrow to get things right.

When Tim and I left we started getting the ping pong balls ready by putting small holes in them so that we could fill them with water to control the weights. Also got a syringe from Daiso across the road to fill them. So I did that, and filled them with different amounts of water.




1. Completely empty
2. 10mL
3. 20mL
4. Full up 30mL

Next step for Tim and I would be to see if these weights would be fine and to see how much the counterweights need to be in order for the flip flop switches we're making to be effective.

We've decided that we can't use the dish vortex to slow down the flow of ping pong balls going to the switches. This is because the hole would need to be big for a ping pong ball to go through and therefore the dish would be proportionately huge. Thus, we can't use it because it would be way too big. An alternative we could try out would be the zig-zags I posted about earlier.