Rubber Band Racing Cars

Winding the rubber bands requires energy which is supplied by you.

Rubber band racing cars.

Once you know the basics of building a rubber band car you can experiment with you own design and construction. With the rubber band cars the rubber used is made up of long polymer chains that in their natural state are all wrinkled up. A clothespin car would make a great camp craft too. This is probably one of our favorite rubber band toys we have made.

Build and race your ow. Here are the items needed for your diy race car and the step by step directions for making a diy rubber band racer. Speaking of camp everyone remembers making a god s eye craft right. Using simple household materials and tools it was super easy to create a rubber band powered racer.

Rubber band cars are a fun way to learn about motion propulsion and energy. Firstly by pulling back the rubber band racer you stretch the rubber band thereby storing energy also known as potential energy. Rubber bands are a convenient and effective way to teach energy transformation and this rubber band car makes that lesson a blast. I m a huge race car fan so when we started experimenting with wheeled vehicles in our kid testing lab i knew just what i wanted to create.

It ended up being a really cool car. Project kit by kiwico. It s a thicker cardboard and will definitely hold up better. The kids can have races with their newly created toys.

While you can certainly use a paper towel tube for your car i chose a sturdier tube that came from a box of aluminum foil. This rubber band car tutorial comes right out of the pages of one of my new books rubber band mania. When you wind up the rubber bands to power the car you re forcing the polymer chains to straighten out which creates elastic potential energy. When you let the rubber band racer go the stored energy in the tension of the rubber band is released and is transferred to the rear axle an application of the first law of thermodynamics.

The steps below require some adult assistance as we used an electric drill and a hot glue gun but our kid testers were happy to help with the other. Watch the video and decide for yourself. They are also fun to play with and race. It might be our favorite diy kid s toy we have made we ve made plenty of diy wooden cars too.

Find this and all sorts of easy crafts for kids on this blog and pin or bookmark them for hours of fun.