Scissor Lift (by Craft Sticks!)

Scissor lifts were first built to do an incredible amount of lifting work of large machines and workers. However, they can also be used to poke your friends, so that's great, too!

This scissor lift is highly mod-able in that you make your scissor lift as short or long as you want, and make it do strange behaviors depending on your connectors. Have fun! We'd like to give a huge shout out to the Community Science Workshop Network for the design!

The details:

• What: Scissor Lift!
• Time: About 5 minutes
• Cost: 25 cents
• Materials:
  • Craft Sticks
  • Push Pins
  • Glue Sticks
• Tools:
  • Drill
  • Scissors
• Concepts: Simple Machines, Mechanical Engineering

Make a stack of all your craft sticks, and drill three holes. You'll want them close to either end, and one right in the middle. The holes need to be big enough for the tip of a push pin to get through, so not too big. We used a 1/8" drill bit for the job.

Make your glue sticks in to small chunks that the push pins will go in to. These can be about half an inch long. We used 1.5 glue sticks for the whole project.

Time to connect them all together! Line up your craft sticks as so, and push the pin through and in to the glue stick on the other side. Some like to do this with metal brads, but this method is great for full range of motion with no catches.

Once you get the system of connecting middles and ends, you repeat all the way up! You can also add in some other connections to make some strange mechanical behaviors.

Here are my futile attempts to get some coffee, but have fun with it! You can put all sorts of things on the end to add some humor to it. Signs, boxing gloves, pom-poms all make great starts!

Happy lifting!