- Try to keep design simple, using multiples of triangles. An inverted triangle is more stable than a triangle with the apex on top.Hot glue tends to cook and melt the ends of the spaghetti, so use just enough to hold pieces together.The bearing points are the points where the bridge is supported at the ends by the edge of the gorge. This area should be flat and smooth. If the bearing point is not flat, the bridge may twist and break.Spaghetti may be stranded together like a cable or rope.Spaghetti is brittle and is quite strong in axial tension but very weak in compression. The hint here is to make the compression members as short as practical, by adding internal web members.Try to make the spaghetti connections strong but flexible. If the connections are too rigid, when the bridge starts to deflect, the joints will twist and rotate and put added bending force into the spaghetti. Spaghetti is not very strong in bending! In fact, if the ends of the spaghetti are cooked and weakened at the joints, then the bending forces from the joint twisting will break the spaghetti very quickly.Some people have tried boiling the spaghetti for 25 minutes and then slowly drying it while drawing the spaghetti to a longer and more slender dimension. The result is a spaghetti member that is very flexible, light in weight yet quite strong in tension. It is said this process makes for a good tension member but a terrible compression member!
- source: http://civil.camosun.bc.ca/spaghetti_bridge/Tips.htm
Spaghetti Bridge
This is the spaghetti bridge that holds the world record for most weight held by a spaghetti bridge 978 pounds!.This proves that if you make the bridge right it will hold a lot of weight, the spaghetti if put together right can be very strong. There first test bridge only held 448 kilograms but this one they said they knew that it would hold a lot more than that. They put a lot of hard work into this and they shattered the old record which held 90 kilograms less than this one.