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Hi Cricket—

At Iridescent we use 1/8" ID plastic tubing with off-the-shelf veterinary
plastic syringes to do basic hydraulics stuff with our students. While
these materials are not durable enough to be appropriate for fixed museum
exhibit use, they're quite low cost (60cc, the biggest syringes, are about
40¢ apiece, ranging down to 3cc syringes at 5¢ apiece; and tubing 12¢/foot)
and perhaps you'd want to use them either for your own prototyping or as a
consumable part of the exhibit. A few basic experiments you can do with
these are:

1) Hook up two syringes of equal size with air in the line versus with
water in the line. What's the difference in their behavior? What's the
difference between pushing and pulling the syringes?

2) Hook up two syringes of different size (preferably with water in the
line). What's the difference in force and distance when you push one versus
the other?

3) Using tees, attach more than two syringes to each other. Can you arrange
them to lift a heavy weight a short distance?

Obviously there are many design challenges to be had with this stuff, and
these are just three starting points. The point is that at very low cost
these are legitimately valuable learning tools and perhaps might be
appropriate for what you're looking to do.

Parts we use for anyone who's interested in playing with this stuff:

60cc syringes: Med-Vet (shopmedvet.com) part 60CCVLL, 25/box for $9
3cc syringes: Med-Vet part 3CCVLS, 100/box for $5
MedVet has good deals on syringes 1cc through 60cc, just search for
veterinary use syringes.

tubing: buy by the foot from McMaster-Carr, (mcmaster.com) part 5231K139,
12¢/ft when you buy 100 or more feet

barbed tees: McMaster-Carr part 5116K13, $3.80 for 10-pack

If anyone has any questions about this stuff, please feel free to contact
me off-list.

-bobby
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-- 
Robert Zacharias
Head of the Explainers
Iridescent NYC <http://iridescentlearning.org>
890 Garrison Ave.<http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=890+garrison+ave,+nyc&aq=&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=52.902929,131.748047&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=890+Garrison+Ave,+Bronx,+New+York+10474&ll=40.817138,-73.890159&spn=0.012472,0.032165&z=16>
Bronx, NY 10474
office ☎ 718 502 9555

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