some might recall a year ago when i thought it’d be fun to build a trebuchet and later discovered that there was on in the area. already built! and ready for launching stuff. so some friends and i packed it up, moved it and attempted to fling things. only to discover that it was harder to fling things than we thought, mainly because we didn’t anticipate how much counter weight you need – about 100x the weight of the thing you’re flinging. so a 5 pound object needs 500 pounds of counterweight, which – if you think about it – is a lot of weight.

well, it took a year, but we finally got the whole gang together and launched some water bottles filled with rocks about a 100 yards which was about the best we could do with the 250 pounds of counterweight we had attached.

it’s a low-tech trebuchet with none of the fancy mechanisms for holding the launching arm in place before letting it loose.

you have to pull the arm down and let go and hope and pray your feet don’t get tangled in the lines.

it you look closely you can see the bottle in the upper left portion of the frame.

i had hoped we could launch watermelons, or boulders or flaming cauldrons of tar. but alas, the laws of physics dictated that we could only launch water bottles filled with pebbles with 250 pounds of counterweight.

certainly not going to storm the castle with water bottles!

all-in-all, flinging water bottles the length of a football field was fun, but the marauder in me did wish we could have flung something more substantial. but the 100x counterweight rule of thumb is brutal. the trebuchet was creaking under the strain of the 250 pounds of counterweight and it’d take some serious design chops to build a trebuchet that could, say, launch a flaming piano.

hmmmmmm….maybe next year?