Saturday, February 12, 2011

Imagine that ...

One answer to the puzzler could be 1,427 board feet of lumber! This will be used for various parts of Bridge #4.

Thinking back to my classroom days the number one question put to most visiting foreign exchange students was, "How old do you have to be to drink in your country?" I am sure my students had a sound educational reason for asking. So along those lines, how much would 1,427 board feet of green pine lumber weigh? This will be important to know as we go about determining the load capacity of the bridge. I needed to weigh a few 8 foot long 4x4's and 6x6's to get some data. The digital scale used by the wrestling team came in handy for this. Although the density of pine varies I calculated the weight to average 2.35 pounds per board foot. I did a cubic foot of fallen snow too, but that's another story. All of the materials used in building the bridge will be considered the dead load.

I have a series of thoughts to cover as we go through the design and planning for this 32' Town Lattice Truss Bridge #4. I hope to engage the readers of this Blog to participate in 21st Century Career Technology Education as I see it. Experiences with, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Collaboration, Written & Oral Communications, Creativity, Self-Direction, Leadership, Adaptability, Responsibility and Global Awareness, to name a few. I challenge you to question everything. To comment and give specific useful, realistic, applications of these bridge building experiences to solve other related and unrelated problems in the real world as you see and experience it. This will be a "Bridge To The Future".

Puzzler - Calculate the number of board feet in a 2x4 - 16' long.

1 comment:

  1. 1,427 Bd ft of rough sawn lumber in the picture.

    Any guess as to the number of pine logs/trees it took?

    ReplyDelete