This simple hydraulic jack can be made at home. Jacks are used to lift very heavy loads with little human effort. They demonstrate a concept of mechanical advantage, where small forces applied for large time or distance can be used to lift very heavy loads for small distance. You will need some ice cream sticks, copper wire, needle, syringes, cardboard piece and a flexi tube. First take a syringe and insert a flexi tube in it. Now put some colored water. We use colored water so that we can see the hydraulics. Insert the second syringe at the other of the flexi tube. Push and pull the plunger to test this part. Now take the ice cream sticks and make three holes at two corners and in the middle using the needle. Do this in all eight sticks. Now take the copper wire and weave it, in the middle of the two sticks. You can make a loop at the end to bind the sticks together. Do this for all 6 sticks to make a lazy tong or a snake like structure. This is the structure with 6 ice cream sticks. Now take the remaining 2 sticks and attach at the top of the structure by making a vertical slit in both of the sticks. This is required for these ice cream sticks to move. And your jack is almost ready. You have to attach the syringe at the bottom of the ice cream stack. Now push the plunger to see the jack move. Pull it to get the jack back. Attach some glue at the top of the jack and fix a cardboard. This is the base on which you can put the load. As we push the plunger a small distance and the load gets lifted for a much larger distance. This shows the concept of mechanical advantage but inversely. To convert this into a real jack where we push the jack for small distance and lift heavier loads we need to invert the assembly. In this case you can see that we are pushing the whole ice cream structure for a large distance to lift the load for a small distance. Here is a very interesting hydraulic device that children can play with.
This work is supported by IUCAA (www.iucaa.in) and TATA Trust (www.tata.com/aboutus/sub_index/Tata-trusts)
Credits:,Ashok Rupner, Manish Jain, Pradnya Pujari, Shivaji Mane, Jyoti Hiremath, Arvind Gupta, Vidula Mhaiskar TATA Trust: Education is one of the key focus areas for Tata Trusts, aiming towards enabling access of quality education to the underprivileged population in India. To facilitate quality in teaching and learning of Science education through workshops, capacity building and resource creation, Tata Trusts have been supporting Muktangan Vigyan Shodhika (MVS), IUCAA's Children’s Science Centre, since inception. To know more about other initiatives of Tata Trusts, please visit www.tatatrusts.org
