Let us try a bigger hammer. That bigger hammer is not working either. Hello I am Jared, welcome to FunScienceDemos.
My job today is to split this piece of wood into separate pieces.
it is a lot of work, but through science we have discovered there are machines to
make that work easier. In other videos we highlighted some of those simple
machines that make our work easier. Today we are going to talk about a very
specific type of simple machine: the wedge. This wedge is a simple machine, and
its job is to make it easier to push things apart or to separate things. So I
want to try and use a wedge to split this piece of wood into two pieces. Here is
another type of wedge. Which side of this wedge do you think I am going to use to
split this in half? This side? Or this side? So let us take a look and see which one
works better.
That side did not seem to work too well. I wonder what will happen when I use this side of my wedge? Take a look. I would say it did a really good job making my work
of splitting this piece of wood in half a whole lot easier. So our wedge had no problem in
separating this piece of wood. Check this out. Can my wedge actually split and separate this
piece of wood? It almost seems impossible but science can do amazing things. Let us
see this wedge at work. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the wedge at work. But what we
want to do now is take a closer look at really how is this wedge working. To do
that we are going to go to the table with some other neat demonstrations. Now, to take a
closer look at how a wedge actually works we need to do some measuring. To do
that we have one block that is a wedge and another block that is not a wedge, and
I want to see how much force it takes to move both of these blocks through some
dry rice. All I have here is actually three big bags of dry rice, and we are
going to try and move these blocks through that dry rice to see how much
force it takes. How do we know how much force it takes? we are going to use our
good old trusty spring scale. So we have a block in our bed of rice, and I want
you to watch what happens to the rice when I push my block through the rice.
As I push it through the rice you can see the rice does not do a good job of
separating. It all kind of bunches up in the front. now, let us see what kind of force
that takes as we push the block through the rice. I am bringing my spring scale,
put it onto my block, and I will begin to pull. As I pull, you can see about
600 grams with this flat block. so we have seen what our flat block can do, let us see
what our wedge does, as it travels through the rice. so let us start to pull
this wedge through the rice.
take a close look at the spring scale as I pull. I start to pull and it is pulling
about 300 grams. I am going to stop right there so you can see. we will zoom in. it is just at 300 grams - you can
see it moves as soon as I tug. this flat block took about six hundred grams of
force to move it through the rice, but this wedge took about half that - only 300 grams
of force to move this wedge through the rice. I would say looking at our data, the wedge
really does make our job easier
of separating things and moving things apart. wedges are at work all around us. take a
look at this. these two pieces of metal are actually almost about the same size
but there is one difference. look at the end. the end of this nail is a wedge.
this has a flat front. there is no wedge to it. let us see what happens when I try to
hammer both of these into this block of wood. i am thinking that this wedge might make
my work a whole lot easier.
what do you think? let us take a look and see what happens.
First, the flat one.
You can see it did make a little indentation in the wood, but now let us compare it to
the nail. you can see my wedge did a whole lot better job in separating that
would, so that nail could be pushed down a whole lot further than the flat part.
wedges are at work
everywhere around us. wedges are even at work in our kitchens. Believe it or not, each of
these items is an example of a wedge. these wedges make our life a lot easier.
they make work easier. whether it is a knife that is used to separate pieces of food...
a fork is actually a wedge. take a closer look at the tip. it separates the
food so I can get in and grab it. the spatula is used to separate things off
of a pan. a cheese grater, or a grater, is used to separate pieces off of the
carrot. a peeler that is actually a wedge that separates a nice thin slice of
something from something else.
science is so cool. wedges at work. they are everywhere. Wedges just do not only just make
work easier, sometimes wedges make work a whole lot of fun! science is so cool.
sometimes it is tasty, and many times it makes it easier. if you want to learn
more about simple machines, check out our links in the video description. thanks
for watching.