I have to make a compound machine using 4 simple machines. Help?

Question

Hello. I have to make a compound machine using 4 DIFFERENT simple machines. Help? I would prefer it to be simple and something I can put together within 2 days.

Answer 1

For inspiration, look to some Rube Goldberg-style machines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pAmVipomcA
http://autorepair.about.com/od/glossary/a/honda_rube.htm

Or look around the house for examples:
scissors involve lever and wedge
bicycles involve the whole list

One of the classic school activities is making a car powered by a mouse trap. Any way you do it, and there are many ways to do it, it will take multiple simple machines:

A search for "mouse trap car" on either Yahoo or Google will return lots of hits and some pictures as well. Here are just two:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Mouse-Trap-car/
http://www.hypography.com/hypography.cfm?id=103

And a search on Flickr returns 77 photos.