Final competition

Competition day arrived and i felt ready, i stayed after school the day before to have my trebuchet finely tuned and ready to win. There were two competitions one for accuracy, who could get closer to a bulls eye and hit the wall on the bulls eye and distance, whose threw the longest. In the accuracy i threw three times and my best counted, i was two inches from the middle and hit the wall, but lost and got second, beat by one inch! On the distance my trebuchet didn't fire like i wanted so on my third throw i adjusted and threw again, i had second again beat by a few feet. Overall throw i had first place and was pretty happy.

Testing the trebuchet

Testing the trebuchet was crazy! The first time i fired it the ball went backwards and did the next ten times too. After that and a lot of adjusting i fired forward, not very far, but forward.I adjusted the slip hooks and turned my throwing arm and gradually had it firing great. i had a small trebuchet with a ton of power.

Building my Trebuchet.

Drawing anything in solidworks and actually building the object are two completely different things. In about a week and a half i built a trebuchet from pine wood, hooks, lead, string, metal, and cabinet liner. Everything in solid works snaps right together and perfect straight cuts, but solid works is not real life.Every time you cut a piece of wood it tends to try to mess up, it could split and crack! The machine in the picture that me(right side) and my class mate are using was used to cut long pieces of wood vertically that was too large for other saws. Your wood in this machine is not always going to be straight, it took me a few times to realize that. Assembling the trebuchet together is also a challenge because you could screw or glue something together that won't be straight as you think.

Creating of my drawings

Above is pictures of drawings from Solid Works, one of my base and trestle, and the other of the throwing arm. The drawings help you understand how you will approach building the trebuchet when it comes time to make the model.The specifications of the trebuchet are also shown and can easily be changed in Solid Works to incorporate any new ideas you come up with.The drawings are the exact parts I am going to build and hopefully everything will work.

Research

This post is about the study and research of the trebuchet. I have to research the trebuchet before building a model for a class competition in a distance and accuracy test.There are many credible sites to learn about the trebuchet and the physics of how it works. The trebuchet consists of trestles, a base, an axle, and a throwing arm and sling to throw the projectile. A mideival trebuchet would have been a few stories tall with the counter weight on the throwing arm weighing a few tons.The trebuchet im building will be a scale model. How the trebuchet works is simple to understand, the end of the throwing arm with the sling is latched to the base and then released and the end of the throwing arm with the counter weight, which is suspended, is dropped and pivots on the axle making the end with the sling throw the projectile. The picture above is the trebuchet I designed in solid works.


Here is a link to show you the trebuchet and watch to see how it works. http://science.discovery.com/videos/punkin-chunkin-2009-trebuchets.html