1) As lucwilder42 says, do yourself a favor; read and learn. That will answer many of your questions, including some you haven't thought of yet.sciencegeek8 wrote:Me and my amazing partnerare new at tower building. We are not sure what degree angle our tower should be at in the 30 cm base section that connects to the top "chimmney". Does anyone have any pointers?
Example of response: 45 degrees is stronger than 60 degrees... anything like that.
2) The more angle (from the vertical) to the legs, the more force they see (for a given load). Therefore, you want to minimize the angle. The rules define the minimum angle you can get away with.
The bottoms of the legs have to span the 10cm square hole in the test base- for a square, 4-legger, that means a little more than 10cm between the inside faces of the pairs of legs that are across from each other (so they sit at, and just outside of, the midpoints of the sides of the test base hole). We align the bottom leg ends 3mm out from the hole edge on each side
The tops have to fit inside the 8cm circle; to minimize the lean-in angle, that means just fit inside the circle. We allow 1mm clearance.
With those clearances, the leg angle works out to about 12.5 degrees (to the vertical)