In order to mimic a real car wash, involving water in our miniature car wash was an important factor. We needed something that would spray water onto the car, but not in large amounts since we needed to keep the handy boards dry. We toyed with many different ideas, including spray bottles, and finally decided to use facial mist cans as our water source. These cans are similar to aerosol hairspray cans and spray a very fine mist of water. We experimented with the one can of Evian facial mist, which was relatively easy to depress and spray. The first mechanism we built was a tower that had a gear track at the top. When the motor was turned on, the gear track moved downward and depressed the spray button. To improve this mechanism we even put switches into the back of the gear track so that it would be able to sense when to stop moving up or down. This seemed to work well, but when we went out and got new cans of facial mist (non-Evian brand) we discovered that the new cans were much more difficult to spray. Our original mechanism did not work with these new cans. After brainstorming and trying new ideas we decided to build a mechanism that involved a fixed lever arm positioned over the spray button which would be pulled down with a pulley-like system. This mechanism required a lot of bracing to keep the force of the pulley from breaking the entire system, but we eventually got it to work beautifully.

-Before-

-After-

Code:

to mist

when [(switch 8)] [repeat 3 [bc, onfor 10 rd onfor 10 rd]]

end

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