Friday, May 25, 2012

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.