One of my sons friends stayed over yesterday and mentioned in passing he'd been assigned to make a mouse trap car for school. I thought about how I had lots of fun making those way back and decided to make one out of scraps off my desk and document it. It's far from the best one ever and unlikely to win any awards, but it does work.
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I used the following:
A mouse trap
4 eye hooks
6 balloons
2 bic pens (the smooth kind)
2 tops from pop cans (for the serious perhaps washers, or otherwise any other bendable metal)
some string (not pictured)
4 CDs/DVDs (expendable ones). Here 3 CDRs and a blank transparent thing from the top of a spindle. I hear DVDs are a bit lighter, but I'm not optimizing that hard.
A mouse trap
4 eye hooks
6 balloons
2 bic pens (the smooth kind)
2 tops from pop cans (for the serious perhaps washers, or otherwise any other bendable metal)
some string (not pictured)
4 CDs/DVDs (expendable ones). Here 3 CDRs and a blank transparent thing from the top of a spindle. I hear DVDs are a bit lighter, but I'm not optimizing that hard.
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You stick the hollow pen thing through the eyelets. Then, on each side, you slide the pop can tabs onto the pen. They shouldnt move around on the pen. Basically, they're there so that the axle wont slide out of the eyelets sideways. They're like blockers or something.
If you have(had) a certain length requirement you could get it fairly accurate as to how far it travels and then stops. I had a project back in 8th grade where we had to make a car out of trash type materials, start it on the outside of a circle, let it go and it had to roll to the middle of the circle. Every inch was a couple points off the total score for the project. I made one of these mouse trap cars and got 100% on the project.
Because of how the string wraps around the axle, you wouldn't need more than probably 1m of string (might be wrong) to go the 10m distance, but that's all trial and error getting the right amount of string.
This is your back axle. After putting it into place I used a bit of hot glue in two single bars to keep the axle from slipping back out of the eye holes. The original creator used bottle top tabs. Mine were too big and hit the wood, not allowing it to spin freely so I decided to abandon the bottle tabs and use a line of hot glue.. After I got the back axle in place, I tied the string to the flip bar- the thing that will snap back in place once you let go it (the thing that originally was used to hold the little mouse down to the wood).
To make your car run after you add the wheels, hold the snap bar back and roll the back axle up so the thread is wound around the back axle. When you let the mousetrap bar go, it will fling forward and pull the back axle incredibly fast. I discovered that undoing one side of the bar so that it was actually straight on one side made it FAR less scary to use :) Check out a couple of the other mousetrap cars to see their strings attached to long poles. That is the mousetrap bar opened on one side and bent straight. So it goes from a staple shape to an "L" shape. It works just as well, but seems less likely to nip the user.
Good luck.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you're still unclear. I will try to explain a different way.