{"id":640,"date":"2010-08-28T10:40:33","date_gmt":"2010-08-28T10:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2010-08-28T11:38:37","modified_gmt":"2010-08-28T11:38:37","slug":"pub-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/?p=640","title":{"rendered":"Pub engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever wondered what happens when engineers go to the pub? We get uncontrollable bridge building urges. We tried to build a bridge between two tables using the fewest beer mats. Before reading on, take a guess what we got it down to.<\/p>\n

Here is our original bridge, which was a corbel arch<\/a> design. It consumed about thirty beer mats.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The green mats are shaped like a capital B, so they can be locked together. So we were down to twenty-ish.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you form the bridge into my “snake” design, you can get rid of the weights at the ends and reduce the mats used down to ten.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That seemed like a good design, but actually having a weights works better as the bridge is straight and even. So we are now down to nine mats (it stayed up without my hand there).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you let the bridge sag a little and allow the ends to twist you can cut form it using eight.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Martin then suggests flipping the direction of the B links half way across the bridge and we were down to seven.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some careful balancing and you can get it to be stable with just six mats.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you push the B links into each-other the mats will tear a little and lock together. This way you can alternate the links and make a bridge with five mats. Also in the photo is Andrew’s zipper double bridge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If tearing is allowed, I take it to the natural conclusion of locking the mats together with small cuts. Sudden leap forward as we have a three mat bridge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tear each mat in two and link the parts to make a bridge with two mats.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can rip a single mat into a continuous strip which makes you rope bridge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now that it is so lightweight, you can span the distance with half a mat. Martin is declared the winner.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So that was our final design. Once you go into fractional beer mats, it gets a little hard to measure. We also created made a bit of a mess.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks go to the Ducie Arms<\/a> who supplied us with the mats and tidied up after we left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever wondered what happens when engineers go to the pub? We get uncontrollable bridge building urges. We tried to build a bridge between two tables using the fewest beer mats. Before reading on, take a guess what we got it down to. Here is our original bridge, which was a corbel arch design. It consumed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":659,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brej.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}