Talk:Mousetrap car

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[edit] School Project

How good to know. My class is doing these soon. When we do, I may contribute more content to this article. In the meanwhile, I'm formatting it and fixing up the spelling and grammar. I'm also moving it to mousetrap car, as that's the name of the mousetrap article. --TCM (Talk) 00:06, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Building Instructions?

Should we include building instructions? There is no one way to make a mousetrap car and including directions on this page implies this is THE way to build mousetrap cars. I feel creativity needs to be left open to the constructor of the car.

Benwildeboer 03:20, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copyvio

Large sections of this article have been cut and pasted from http://users.bigpond.net.au/mechtoys/mouse.html, a page that is tagged with a copyright notice. Much of the rest of it is copied verbatim from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~first/EngineeringTriathlon/MousetrapCar/, copyright status unknown. (I have reverted the content from bigpond.net.au) Neil916 (Talk) 07:40, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revamp

I revamped the site to be less specific about a particular type of competition and more inclusive. I believe in doing so I took out the rest of the questionable content. I will try to continue to improve the site as time goes on... Benwildeboer 12:45, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Commercial links

i believe some of the links contained in this article are commercial and should be removed? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tarcus (talk • contribs) 06:06, October 14, 2006 (UTC)

Done. Neil916 (Talk) 16:21, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lever arm

The last section says that the lever arm is longer for both speed and distance cars. Which is true? I would have thought both would want as long as is practical. --SHCGRA Max 18:56, 1 May 2007 (UTC)


One typically wants a long lever arm for distance, and a short lever arm for speed. The whole theory "boils down" to work=force*distance, and f=ma. Long distance cars need to have a gear ratio that trades off force for distance (which means long lever arms), and speed cars need to have gear ratios that focus on force (so they have high acceleration) while being just concerned enough about distance to complete the race (so, short lever arms).

Would anyone be too upset if I rewrote most (if not all) of this article? Not saying I will, but I think someone should. 137.229.63.47 (talk) 23:57, 10 May 2008 (UTC)