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Warwick Manufacturing Group

Rubber Band Powered Cars

Build Your Own Rubber Band Powered Vehicle!

First page of the 'Elastic Band Cars' booklet

Description

This session can be run remotely or as an in-classroom activity.

In-class activity

WMG Outreach can visit your school with the kit for these vehicles and work with your students to build, test, and tinker with the vehicles. This is a fun challenge for year 7 students and can be run in 1 hour.

If you are interested in this, please register your interest with the form found at this link.

Remote resource

Alternatively, we can post boxes of these vehicles out to you for you to run the session yourself.

If you are interested in this please email wmgoutreach@warwick.ac.uk or use the register interest form detailing your request.

Here are the building instructions.

  1. Clip the wooden pieces togetherAn animation showing the wooden pieces of the vehicle being clipped together
  2. Thread an elastic band through the hole at the front of the vehicle
  3. Insert the axles through the side panels of the vehicle
  4. Wrap a very small piece of sticky tape around the middle of the rear axle
  5. Tighten a cable tie on top of that piece of sticky tape
  6. Trim the cable tie close to the axle to remove the 'tail'
  7. Push wheels on to the axles (if they are loose you can wrap a small piece of tape around the axle and then twist the wheels on to the axle-and-tape combo)
  8. Use the hook to pull the elastic band back and hook it on to the cable tie on the rear axle
  9. Place the car on the ground and pull it back to wind the elastic band around the rear axle
  10. Release and watch it roll!
  11. Try out different wheels, elastic bands, any other ideas, and see how fast and far you can make your vehicle go!

Video tutorials on putting the car together and more pictures for the instructions, plus high scores and pictures of the best creations are still to come to this page. Bear with us!

This activity is designed to compliment the fantastic work that Ant Allen (amongst others!) and the Advanced Propulsion Centre at WMG do with Greenpower to build electric go karts in schools. Find out more: