Free Body Diagrams

Class, if I may call you that. I have been informed that many of you are struggling with free body diagrams recently. I can relate because when I first started learning about them myself I struggled to wrap my head around the concept. Now what I do might seem strange to some of yall however it works for me. What I do is envision myself as the object listed and imagine all of the forces acting on me. It might seem weird but try it sometime it will work. I know Dr. Lane likes when you draw a representation of the object but I also like to use squares it helps to give a better scale on the vectors direction. These free body diagrams help to calculate forces in Newtons Second Law because they show you the magnitude and direction of the forces. In seeing this what you have to do is find the x and y components (try rotating the force to get a vertical and horizontal force line, it helps) then just add them like vectors to find the net force. Let me know how all of this works for you.

VonHayes

P.S. Try looking at this website some time, it divulges a lot of helpful information, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html