First things first, how much weight can a single strand of spaghetti take?

To make sure that all my tests are fair I’ll be adding the weight in small increments and waiting 10 seconds between each to make sure that it is actually taking the weight. I’ll also be performing each test 5 times to try and rule out any erroneous results.

Test 1: how much weight can a strand of spaghetti take over a distance of 180mm?

Spaghetti is really flexible!! It dipped down 30mm from horizontal before it gave way on average after 26g

So what would happen if I halved the distance? Would the spaghetti take twice the weight?

Turns out it’s more than twice as strong, the spaghetti strands to an average of 66g before breaking so about 2.5 times stronger.

Next I’m going to try groups of 5 strands, are they as strong as 5 individual strands or stronger?

Ok so 5 individual strand would take approximately 130g, the results above show that 5 strands together are, in fact, a bit weaker at an average of 118g.

 Now to up it to 10 strands.

10 individual strands would take 260g so… again they work out a weaker than the sum of its parts at an average of 222g.

Now to see how they behave when the glue is added into the mix. As I’m going to be creating my structure from bundles of spaghetti glued together I want to see if gluing the bundles I have already tested effects the amount of weight they can support.

5 strands glued are, on average, 1.07 times stronger than the previous bundles of 5.

10 strands glued are, on average, 1.13 times stronger than the previous bundles of 10.

Interesting, I wonder If I can use this to try and predict how much weight my final bridge will take…