APC
Artifact Preservation & Co.
Transportation Draft
The Plan
The Moai will be pushed off the cliff with manpower and will then roll horizontally facing upward. The logs will make it go quickly and gain enough momentum to go on the vehicle. The vehicle will have one wheel planted on the slope and will be perfectly aligned with the log mechanism to smoothly get the Moai on it. The Moai will reach the vehicle with great speed making the car move forward. The car will stop when it reaches the Ahu because we will have put a tiny piece of wood as seen in the diagram above. The final stage of the transportation is getting it on the Ahu facing the slope. We will do this using a pulley and an electromagnet. The Moai will be wrapped with string and have a hanger on its top. The hanger on the Moai will also be an electromagnet like the one on the pulley. The string on the pulley will attach to the Moai by itself and it will slowly go up because there will be people up on the pulley base moving the handle (this means we will operate the pulley manually, but we will build it compatible to to fit the average humans). The Moai will be wrapped in the string to preserve it but also once it is on the Ahu, we will make the base versatile and make it go round. We will have people close to the Moai that will slowly unravel the Moai and make it face toward the Island.
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The logs:
Actual wooden logs may be a bit too heavy so we are also looking into toilet paper rolls. Ideally it will be approximately 0.8 cm wider on its side then the Moai’s width is and each log will be 0.4 – 0.6 cm apart. The string or wire that makes the logs move will be 0.1 cm on each side. The logs and the string/wire will be interconnected using two pieces of wood on each side to hold the mechanism.
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The vehicle:
The group will make the vehicle. It will have a simple design, two wheels, one large plank of wood as a base and one other piece of wood to prevent the Moai from falling off. Side pieces will be unnecessary.
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The pulley:
The goal for the pulley since we will be the ones operating it (meaning actual humans will be able to do it) is to make it look like a miniature copy of an actual pulley that would lift things to show that humans would actually manually operate the pulley. The design of the pulley hasn’t been fully thought of yet, but it will have to be sturdy to since it will be carrying an electromagnet.
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The Ahu:
Even though we don’t build the Ahu and it is given to us, we would like to make it versatile in a way where we can rotate it 360 degrees. This will allow us to place the Moai facing the island. As mentioned briefly in Plan A’s description we will have string wrapped on the Moai, hence whilst the rope unravels the Moai the base moves with it preventing the Moai from falling.