This week in technology we built our own cranks out of paper. The paper was provided by a packet along with instructions on how to make the crank. The rest of the materials needed to assemble the crank were glue, ruler, scissors, tape, and a tiny exacto knife (the scissors,  exacto knife, and ruler were for cutting the shaped out of the packet).

Before I show you how my crank turned out here is a photo of a type of crank for reference

Now here is the one I made out of paper

As you can see inside the cube shape that I built is a gear that is attached to a handle on the side. The handle is supposed to make the gear be able to rotate. As you can also see mine has a lot of tape on it to keep it together, it also has a lot of glue but you can’t see that. The problem with my crank was that it was too fragile. The gear wouldn’t fully rotate without hitting what I called “road bumps”, I meant road bumps as in little stops where I thought the whole thing would just collapse. When turning, I had to be really careful because it was so fragile I was afraid it would break. I think the reason for this is when I was making the gear I probably didn’t put enough tape on it or stick it into the cube as good as I should have so if I were ever to make another crank, I would definitely improve on that. But ultimately, I think it’s pretty good for the first try and it was better then I expected, after all I was surprised it could even move. I’m still proud of it though, and I had fun making it!