Final Project Plans: Mousetrap Car

My final project is about completely redesigning a mousetrap car that I made 5 years ago in high school. I decided that the main goal is to make the car go beyond 200 feet, which is a distance that my old design did not even come close to accomplishing. I’ve done some research and found that the best design for a long distance mousetrap car is one with a long lever arm. The lever arm needs to be long but not too long in order to avoid making the car too heavy and increasing friction with the ground. I decided to make the lever arm 12 inches long based on an experiment that I found online.

The next step after coming up with a design is to obtain the needed materials. Luckily, I was able to find most of the crucial parts and components online and have already ordered them. I will still need to obtain a hand drill, a saw and glue in order to put the project together.

This is the design that I am planning to integrate, which is simple but will be effective in achieving the long distance goal that I set.

As an alternative, I was considering a three wheeled design with the same lever length, which would look something like this:

I’m also planning to attach some black cardboard cutouts to the two wooden planks that make up the car’s body to make its side view resemble a Batmobile. I might think of a way to overlay some carboard pieces so that it’d end up looking like this.

Carboard is also lightweight so I think adding it to the design won’t increase friction that much.

Sources:

Experiment on different lever arm length

http://2ndeducation.blogspot.com/2007/11/etec-110.html

https://www.docfizzix.com/products/parts-supplies/supp700df.shtml?redirect=1