hydraulics

I had many requests for a step by step instruction of making the "Hydraulic Crane".

Although this wasn't my construction (one of my brilliant students did this one for a project that I assigned), I can figure out the basics from what I saw.

Note: The following is only meant as a start for anyone that wants to try this project. However, everyone has their own twist to every assignment, every design. Use your imagination to make the crane better, and your own!

Materials:

• 30 mL syringes (x8)
• dialysis tubing (or any other kind of plastic tubing for connecting the syringes together)
• wood (for crane construction and for base)
• anchors (to hold the tubing in place)
• bottle with water (or any other weight to counter balance the crane arm)
• a scoop (any kind of shovel)
• Screws / Nails / Nuts / Bolts
• + Other miscellaneous materials.

Procedure

Hydraulics and Pneumatics are great topics to teach children. First of all both words sound very impressive and when the children learn these words they will sound very important and knowledgeble if they use them. Also, hydraulics and pneumatics are used in many machines and in many everyday applications, therefore it is easy to show the importance of understanding these topics. One can easily show and explain the difference between hydraulics and pneumatics - a great "Compare and Contrast" analysis. Thirdly, there are many fun and impressive experiments that can be done with hydraulics and pneumatics in a very inexpensive way, with very accessible materials. And finally, since hydraulics and pneumatics is so useful, there can be multiple projects that children can actually build themselves. Thus weaker students and stronger science students can both do projects, yet with differing complexity.