Engineers of the SMB question

DaveH

DaveH

Striker
We had a daft conversion with the kids about how high you could build towers out of various food stuff. E.g. how many chocolate buttons piled up to reach the moon (127.5 billion we worked out).

On the subject of jammy dodgers you get the problem that once you add a certain weight, it would collapse. We set out to try and work out how much weight a jammy dodger could take by sticking one on the bench, putting a glass mat on the top and piling weights on top of that. As you would expect, the jam squashed quickly but we managed 30Kg with the biscuit still intact. When we took the mat of the top, it then crumbled. We had run out of weights.

Can anyone think of a way to measure the compressive strength of a jammy dodger? I do have a workshop vice I could use to crush one between two bits of wood, but that would not measure the force applied.
 


Use bathroom scales or if a Jammy Dodger has a higher resistance to compression than I expect a Weigh Bridge. Place a metal plate of known weight on top of the aforementioned dodger and add weight until collapse. Convert the measurement taken using Google.
 
DaveH said:
We had a daft conversion with the kids about how high you could build towers out of various food stuff. E.g. how many chocolate buttons piled up to reach the moon (127.5 billion we worked out).

On the subject of jammy dodgers you get the problem that once you add a certain weight, it would collapse. We set out to try and work out how much weight a jammy dodger could take by sticking one on the bench, putting a glass mat on the top and piling weights on top of that. As you would expect, the jam squashed quickly but we managed 30Kg with the biscuit still intact. When we took the mat of the top, it then crumbled. We had run out of weights.

Can anyone think of a way to measure the compressive strength of a jammy dodger? I do have a workshop vice I could use to crush one between two bits of wood, but that would not measure the force applied.
Click to expand...

a) Did you take into account the need for your chocolate button tower to the moon to be wider at the base than at the top?

b) Do you fancy building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland for Boris?
 
DaveH said:
We had a daft conversion with the kids about how high you could build towers out of various food stuff. E.g. how many chocolate buttons piled up to reach the moon (127.5 billion we worked out).

On the subject of jammy dodgers you get the problem that once you add a certain weight, it would collapse. We set out to try and work out how much weight a jammy dodger could take by sticking one on the bench, putting a glass mat on the top and piling weights on top of that. As you would expect, the jam squashed quickly but we managed 30Kg with the biscuit still intact. When we took the mat of the top, it then crumbled. We had run out of weights.

Can anyone think of a way to measure the compressive strength of a jammy dodger? I do have a workshop vice I could use to crush one between two bits of wood, but that would not measure the force applied.
Click to expand...

Half the biscuit?

The compressive strength should be equal through all sizes of buscuit, so if the magnitude of the imposed load is the issue, reduce the bearing area.
 
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DaveH said:
We had a daft conversion with the kids about how high you could build towers out of various food stuff. E.g. how many chocolate buttons piled up to reach the moon (127.5 billion we worked out).

On the subject of jammy dodgers you get the problem that once you add a certain weight, it would collapse. We set out to try and work out how much weight a jammy dodger could take by sticking one on the bench, putting a glass mat on the top and piling weights on top of that. As you would expect, the jam squashed quickly but we managed 30Kg with the biscuit still intact. When we took the mat of the top, it then crumbled. We had run out of weights.

Can anyone think of a way to measure the compressive strength of a jammy dodger? I do have a workshop vice I could use to crush one between two bits of wood, but that would not measure the force applied.
Click to expand...
What did you convert them to?
 
Place the Jammy Dodger on a flat surface, but a large plastic container of some sort on top and slowly fill with water until it is crushed, measure the quantity of water in litres, a litre of water weights 1KG (give or take) - weigh a Jammy Dodger, divide the crush weight by the Dodger weight, giving you the number of Dodgers you could theoretically stack up before the bottom one is crushed
 
Unbalanced Views said:
Place the Jammy Dodger on a flat surface, but a large plastic container of some sort on top and slowly fill with water until it is crushed, measure the quantity of water in litres, a litre of water weights 1KG (give or take) - weigh a Jammy Dodger, divide the crush weight by the Dodger weight, giving you the number of Dodgers you could theoretically stack up before the bottom one is crushed
Click to expand...
You’re forgetting the weight of the container in your initial calculations there.
 

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