The seventh annual Super Light Weight Bridge competition was held at SAMPE 2004 in Long Beach, CA on May 15th. This year we had 64 teams registered and 52 showed up for testing. Of the 52, seven were professional entries and 45 were University teams. We could have registered 10 more, but we just ran out of materials for the kits. As usual, we made a few changes from last year. First, we separated the professional and student competitions. We had some earlier feedback that some students felt intimidated. Well, looking at the results in the table, that certainly doesn't seem to be the case. The student teams did quite well. Another change this year was the use of a pultrusion as the starting point in the contest. In previous years, bridges were built from scratch. This year, a 24-inch pultrusion in the shape of a channel or a flattened "W" was supplied, and the contest objective was to strengthen the pultrusion with minimum additional weight. The two pultrusions weighed either 860 or 435 grams.
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