Sandbox Compression
Experiments

Experiment #1 - Sand was wet inside the bags. Students put in the layers, then waited until the following day to do the
first compression experiment. Top layer of sand dried out, but layers underneath were still damp. This produced
interesting results on the surface of the sand, which looked like it had piles of rocks on top, instead of
the smooth surface of the sand.

We videotaped the compression from two angles, top and side. We had problems with the sandbox
and our woodshop teacher came in the following day and made several adjustments to different
parts of the sandbox mechanisms. The screw mechanism was much too long. We added the aluminum
plate to the front of the moving plate. We also had to add screws to the outer walls (see photo with yellow arrow)
to prevent the screwing mechanism from coming up out of the screw mounts.

Experiment #2 - With the adjustments our wood shop teacher added to the sandbox, it worked much better this time.
Students were not very careful with loading the layers and the resulting faults were not very clear.

Experiment #3 - Students were much more careful in loading the layers of sand during the third run of the experiment.
This time we used dry sand instead of wet sand. The layers showed much clearer faults during the final run of our compression experiments.