Crawler coil. Fun physical experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Crawler coil. Physical experiments

Entertaining experiments in physics

Entertaining experiences at home / Physics experiments for children

Is friction good or bad? To better understand this, make a crawler coil. This is the simplest toy with a rubber motor.

Take an ordinary spool of thread and with a penknife serrate the edges of both her cheeks. Fold a strip of rubber 70-80 mm long in half and push it into the hole of the coil. In the loop of the elastic that peeps out from one end, lay a piece of a match 15 mm long.

Apply a soap washer to the other cheek of the coil. Cut out a circle from a hard, dry remnant about 3 mm thick. The diameter of the mug is about 15 mm, the diameter of the hole in it is 3 mm. Put a brand new, shiny steel nail 50-60 mm long on the soap washer and tie the ends of the elastic in a reliable knot over this nail. Turning the nail, start the crawler coil until a piece of a match begins to scroll on the other side.

Crawler coil

Put the reel on the floor. The elastic band, unwinding, will carry the coil, and the end of the nail will slide on the floor! No matter how simple this toy is, I knew guys who made several of these "creeps" at once and arranged whole "tank battles". The "defeated" were removed from the "battlefield".

After playing with the crawler coil, remember that this is not just a toy, but a scientific instrument. We made this device to get better acquainted with friction. Where is the friction here?

Let's start with a piece of a match. You wind up the rubber band, it stretches and presses the chip more tightly to the cheek of the coil. There is friction between the fragment and the cheek. If this friction did not exist, the match fragment would rotate completely freely and the creeping coil would not be able to start even one revolution at all! And to make it start even better, I advise you to cut a hollow in the cheek for a match. So friction is useful here. It helps the work of the mechanism we have made.

And with the other cheek of the coil, the situation is quite the opposite. Here the nail should rotate as easily as possible, as freely as possible. The easier it slides on the cheek, the farther the creeping coil will go. So friction is bad here. It interferes with the operation of the mechanism. It needs to be reduced. That is why a soap washer is placed between the cheek and the nail. It reduces friction, it acts as a lubricant.

Now consider the edges of the cheeks. These are the "wheels" of our toy. You hacked them with a knife. For what? Yes, so that they better adhere to the floor, so that they do not "slip", as the machinists and drivers say.

Yes, they have such a word. Indeed, in rain or ice, the wheels of the locomotive slip, scroll on the rails, it cannot take a heavy train from its place. The driver has to turn on a device that pours sand onto the rails. For what? Yes, to increase friction. And when braking in ice, sand also pours onto the rails. Otherwise, you won't stop! And on the wheels of the car when driving on a slippery road put on special chains. They also increase friction: they improve the grip of the wheels on the road.

Remember, friction stops a car when it runs out of gas. But if there were no friction of the wheels on the road, the car would not be able to move even with a full tank of gasoline. Its wheels would spin, skid, as if on ice!

Finally, the crawler coil has friction in one more place. This is the friction of the end of the nail on the floor, along which it crawls after the coil. This friction is harmful. It interferes, it delays the movement of the coil. But it's hard to do anything here. Is that to grind the end of the nail with a fine sandpaper.

No matter how simple our toy, it helped to figure it out. Where parts of the mechanism must move, friction is harmful and must be reduced. And where the parts should not move, where good adhesion is needed, there friction is useful and it needs to be increased. And friction is needed in the brakes. The crawler does not have them, she barely crawls anyway. And all real wheeled vehicles have brakes: without brakes, it would be too dangerous to drive.

Author: Galpershtein L.Ya.

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