Jeremy Cobb

My roller coaster was really fun to make and was not at all very difficult. I did run into some troubles on the way though, but I learned how to fix them. The first thing we did was go out to Lowe's to get some of our supplies. We got a 2' by 4' board to use as the base. I wanted a bigger coaster because I didn't think the 1' by 3' was big enough. Then I went to find the tubing. We got everything we needed from there exept the green turf, so we used spray paint instead. Once we got all of our supplies, we spray painted the board green and the wooden dowels yellow. We let them dry and then glue the dowels on with wood glue, but we had to screw in the tall one because it was wobbly. After that, we found these little black holders that we used to string the tubing. We glued them at first, but then we ran into a problem. the tubing had so mauch torque that it popped the holder right off. So then we did it again with some yellow tape along with the glue. It seemed to stay on this time. So we started to make the loop. This was very tricky because the tubing wanted to go its own direction. It was so strong that it ripped the entire dowel off the board. We had to think of something else because it was going to stay. This was a challenge for me. I thought all the next day school. when My mom came home from work, she had cork that she had in her office. I thought it was a briliant idea. It would hold it down. It was a little bit big, but we fixed that by taping four popcycle sticks to it and sticking it in there. But there was still a problem. The ball wouldn't always go up the second hill. I found out at school when we had to take it in, that the reason it didn't go over every time was because there was a little space between the loop and the second hill where the track wasn't spported. So when I let the ball down I suported it with my hand and it went over every time. I was really happy with the way my roller coaster turned out. Even though I had a few problems, I got a chance to fix them and it really taught me a lot about physics.