Acceleration Lab

thingiverse

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1398337 This versatile device serves as an ideal teaching tool for high school physics classes focused on developing a model of uniform acceleration. During our lab sessions, students simultaneously play a metronome and record their findings at precise one- or two-second intervals to produce highly detailed position-time graphs, yielding remarkable quadratic relationships. **Instructions** I fabricated the apparatus using ABS with a 10% infill and 0.27 mm layer height. Upon printing, some surface refinement on the build-platform side was required before I applied super glue to securely attach cones to each end for maximum performance. We selected high-quality electrical conduit from Lowes for the rails – a five-foot-long piece that proves exceptionally practical for this project. The use of bricks to anchor the rails prevents shifting during the experiment, with the warning that excessive incline could compromise data quality, although this won't undermine the validity of the overall model being studied. You may want to consult the attached blog post for more comprehensive insights into the laboratory experiment. **Update** One simple yet effective solution to ensure seamless experimentation results lies in applying a friction-enhancing coating like Plastidip onto the cones. This greatly reduces the risk of apparatus slippage, even when subjected to extreme inclines, leading to exceptionally accurate uniform acceleration models.