Discover Top Posts Tagged with #egg cracking machine

Here is our (mine, Nina's, Chelle's) egg-cracking machine!! It contains numerous simple machines to annihilate a poor, unsuspecting egg.

Basically: the propeller hits the marble, the marble rolls down the ramp into the basket, which pulls the second ramp up via pulley. The, the wheel rolls down the ramp and is deposited onto the third ramp and eventually crashes into the battery stand and knocks the battery into the basket, which detaches the string from the guillotine and causes the blade to fall on another string, which breaks and drops the mallet on the egg. The strainer on the cup keeps the shell from falling into the broken egg guts. (Hopefully).

This is the propeller. It was operated by an electric switch that Chelle had made (if I am correct made out of a remote control car battery?). Eventually, we pulled all but one of the paddles out of it (as seen in picture 6). We had to start the paddle right next to the marble on the other side in order for it to gather enough force to get the marble moving.

This is the first ramp, where the marble started out. It was made out of balsa wood and a clothes pin. The marble rested in one of the grooves until it was hit by the propeller.

This is the marble resting in the basket. The basket was made out of the bottom of a plastic cup and attached to a pulley. The cotton balls were there to keep the marble from bouncing out of the basket. When this basket lowered, it lifted the other piece of the yarn, which was attached to the second, tilting ramp.

This is the counterbalance on the basket. It hung around on the back of the machine. It worked very well to balance the basket.

This is the mechanism that made the second ramp turn. it is a screw put through the shaft of a pen and then bolted onto the machine.

Here is a picture of the main body of the machine. As you can see, on the second ramp we attached a second wheel to act as a counterbalance and to keep it from dumping the wheel back on the wrong side.

Here is the top of the guillotine, which Chelle made and it basically is a legit guillotine. SO COOL YEAH. Not pictured, there was a piece of yarn attached to it that, when torn away, made the guillotine blade fall on the piece of yarn that held the mallet aloft.

Here is the mallet, not aloft, resting in the cup.

THIS IS A PICTURE OF THE WHOLE MACHINE

When we ran the machine, some problems we encountered were these:

The wheel would sometimes get stuck when it got dumped onto the second ramp. Sometimes also it would bounce out.

The wheel was not heavy enough always to hit the battery into the basket, and if it did, sometimes the battery would bounce out of the basket. This turned out to be the thing that kept the machine from working in the long run.

Eventually, though, we dropped the guillotine independently and let the mallet fall. It smashed the egg very efficiently, and if not for the fatal flaw with the wheel and the battery, I am confident that the machine would have worked nicely.

#projects #egg cracking machine