mousetrap car help center

Questions:

How does the super pulley power mouse trap car work?

Answer:
WOW! That is our little secret;) Our Pulley Powered vehicle travel over 180 meters and set a new world record for distance traveled by a mousetrap powered car. The pulley system is set-up so that there is one large pulley wheel that is turned by the mousetrap's lever arm and the large pulley turns a smaller pulley on the drive axle. For every rotation of the large pulley, the drive axle will make form 10-20 times the turns  depending on the start of the run compared to the end of the run -- in the end, the vehicle is pulled over a 400% greater distance than what is possible with "normal" mousetrap racer because of the design of the pulley system. The idea was to set-up a gearing system to decrease the pulling for and increases the pulling distance. This vehicle was a slow traveler take almost 9 min. to travel to its full distance. There are several other secrets but you can order the kit to see the rest of them;)

The basic idea with a good distance travel is to extend the pulling force over the longest possible distance and decease the power output. Years ago we use to design vehicles that had a huge "big wheel" and for every turn of the big wheel, the vehicle would travel a great distance along the floor; we would also extend the lever arm to increase the pulling distance of the vehicle and decrease the pulling force. These older big wheeled vehicles were very difficult to build and most of the time they were more trouble than they were worth. The new pulley system is much easier to build and the cars go much further than the old fashion big wheel cars

With any mousetrap vehicle you have to be willing to make changes and try new things, if we were unwilling to experiment with our ideas we would have never made the supper pulley racer:)

See the following related articles to get started:

• basic mousetrap vehicle propulsions (how to make it move)
• how to make a good distance traveler
• how to make a good speed-trap racer