#mooog

Function

The car moved, but only as much as you pulled it back and if you were lucky it would move a little more off of inertia. The gear system design to propel the car forward at six times the imputed distance required too much of the one delrin barely function torsion spring. So as a result the car pushed itself through the pull back gear train at a one to one ratio with the torsion spring. This was not ideal, but enough to make the car move. 

Changes

There could be many changes to the car that would improve the function, all centered around the relationship from weight to torque. Our biggest problem was the torsion spring itself not being able to pull back without snapping and once it was able to not snap it did not wind up enough. A couple solutions to this are changing the size of the torsion spring, changing the number of torsion springs, changing the width of the torsion spring, or all of these things combined. These solutions all deal with the input, but another way to solve the problem is decreasing the amount of torque required to move the car. To solve that the car could become lighter through decreasing the amount of material used to construct the car, this could be done by slimming all of the layers of the car, decreasing the size of the car itself, or by taking out the layer gear assembly and moving to a stricter gear ratio making the car extremely slim. The last and simple solution would be to just take out the shifting gear mechanism and choose to have the car only rely on one gear train. This would make the car lighter, but also not require the torsion spring to move as many gears. I’m sure not all of these solutions would be as effective as I think they would be, but if a next car would be made it would be able to move a full two feet.

Design