How to Drop an Egg One Story Without It Breaking : Suspended in Tetrahedal

Dropping an egg one story so it won't break requires Engineering a way to do so, as by itself it mostly likely will break.

The engineering setup: Construct a tetrahedral from four balloons and 6 rolled up cardboard tubes, then suspend an egg in the middle using elastic cords made from panty hose legs. The theory being on impact with the ground, the cords will stretch and recoil until all the kinetic energy has been dispersed with the egg remaining unbroken.

When engineering it is useful to consider likely fail points:

In this project they include:

• 1. Egg comes detached.
• 2. Tetrahedral Falls apart.
• 3. Bungee cords breaks.

To reduce these events from occurring when building this project, the following was done:

• The Egg was inserted into a panty hose leg and a knot tied either side, the other panty hose leg was also tied over this one·
• The apex’s (where the cardboard tubes were joined to the balloons), were reinforced using several layers of wide packing tape, connecting the tubes together securely. While the panty hose seems strong, where they are fitted to the apexes are possible fail points.
• The panty hose was attached to the apex using packing tape. It is possible this is not as secure as it needs to be and could come apart.

In Engineering it is important to consider and test for fail points.

An Egg

2 Sheets of cardboard to make 6 tubes from

4 Balloons

Tape, Packing Tape.

Panty hose

Make a tetrahedral from rolled up cardboard, balloons and sticky tape. A couple of sheets of card was used to make the tubes.
Add some more packing tape around the corners so they are very secure and won't easily come apart.

Secure the egg in the middle of one off the cut off legs from the pantyhose. Tie a knot either side to secure. Tie another leg across the egg so it is in the middle of a pantyhose 'cross'.

The pantyhose with the egg inside was attached to the tetrahedral, being suspended from the corners. They were attached using the packing tape, one of the ends pulled lose and had to be reattached. It would be better if they could be tied.