Go The Distance With Your Distance MouseTrap Cars!

One of the most popular projects assigned is to build distance MouseTrap cars.  With this project, there is a friendly (or not so friendly at some university campuses) competition where the students compete to see which mousetrap car goes the farthest distance.

I don’t know if their is an official Guinness World Record for distance mousetrap cars, but there are all sorts of claims around the Internet of student-built distance mousetrap cars traveling as far as 100 meters or more!  That’s pretty darn far for a one mouse-power engine.

The Science of Distance Mousetrap Cars

When it comes down to building your mousetrap car for distance, it’s all a matter of science. If you remember some of your physics theories, you will have stored energy in the form of the wound up mousetrap spring. The key to making your mousetrap car go the farthest is to keep tweaking your design so that it travels at the lowest possible speed. Yes, that’s right I said the slower the better. It’s better to have that puppy crawl 100 meters than to spin out less than 20 meters or so. Distance Mouse Trap Cars Ricky Racer

Of course the other principles apply as well, such as keeping the weight down and reducing friction. However, slowing the speed down is the critical tip to build winning distance mousetrap cars.

More Distance MouseTrap Cars Tips

To find out more tips or to learn exactly how to slow your mousetrap car down for maximum distance, please see our highly recommended distance mousetrap car guides and instruction books at the top-left of the page.  There are even some very good distance mousetrap cars that come complete in kit form.

Click here to return to the home page of Mouse Trap Car site.

Distance mousetrap cars photo from Wikipedia.

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