Problems While Building My Rube Goldberg Machine

My machine is called, The this would be way easier to do by hand machine 9000, and my machines job is to open a book. Rube Goldberg machines are devices that accomplish a simple tasks. They are crazy and complicated machines, but building my Rube Goldberg Machine wasn't just fun and games. I encountered many difficult problems while building my machine. An example was that when my marble went down the screw it tipped it over. To solve this problem I added support beams to every side. Also another problem while I was building my machine was that the wheel on my pulley kept moving across the rod it was on. This problem was easily solved by adding grooves to my pulley, but this wasn't the last problem. The biggest problem was that my dominos wouldn't
go up the ramp without falling down. This caused me to have to think of a completely different way to get up high enough for my pulley to work. I made it so it started high, and so I didn't have to go up, because I was already up. Even though at first my machine didn't work, I didn't give up just like an engineer.
My Rube Goldberg Machine didn't work perfectly the first time I tried to use it.
When I first made my screw, the marble would keep getting stuck. It kept not going completely through the screw. To fix this I made the screw bend down at a bigger angle so it won't get stuck. One other huge problem I had was that my pulley kept falling over. It wasn't sturdy enough to lift up the book. So after I realized my pulley wasn't working I made it out of stronger materials. I made my pulley out of poster board to keep it up right, but this wasn't the last problem. One of the last problems I encountered while working on my project was, that the dominos I had were too small, and they didn't knock down the marbles. So I had to get thicker and bigger dominos, but after they were bigger they worked just fine. At first I thought that building my machine was going to be a piece of cake, but I was wrong, it took lots of hard work and effort. Just like engineering in the real
world.
Even though I knew this project was to help us learn something new, I learned things that I didn't expect to.
An example of this is that the project log checks helped me not procrastinate, and because of these checks I wasn't stressed out. I finished everything in small little steps, and I wasn't trying to finish everything on the last day. Also this helped me learn that something that looks like it will work in your head might not actually work, and if you machine doesn't work you can't stop. You have to kept going. Like when my domino's didn't go up my ramp. I didn't give, and because I didn't give up and found a solution my machine worked. Even though I learned a lot from this project I believe the most important thing I learned was that you need a plan. If I didn’t have a plan this would be a lot harder. Knowing what I was going to before I started building my machine helped me save a lot of time. This is because I knew what materials I needed and I knew what my machine was going to look like. Although, in the end building and planning my machine helped me learn a
lot.
My Rube Goldberg Machine isn't perfect, even though it works it can still be better. If I had more time to work on my machine I would make the screw at the top stronger. Right now my screw is made out of paper and tape. If I could I would make it out of poster board. I would also make my machine more complex. My machine is basically made out of six objects, and I want it to look cooler. Finally I would like to only use three boxes for my base not six of them, and for my base I would like to use a layer of wood not a large white board. In conclusion Engineering has a lot of ups and downs. You might build a machine and it might completely fail, or it may work perfectly, but no matter what engineers never give up and they always make things better.