O/T Weapon Building

My school NJIT hosted a Trebuchet building contest this past weekend. It was called junkpile wars. 11 teams had to build a trebuchet from a pile of wood from a dumpster. We raced to dumpster to get the wood. My team built a floating arm trebuchet, in which the piviting point is the wheels rolling on a set of tracks.


The frame together looked like this with no weights.

The weights made the structure a little wobbly so we added outriggers.

Day 2 was asthetics. I painted some flames on the weight boxes. :NOte the fade: haha

Sorry my pinstriping skills arn't too great.

In the end it was a totall success. We built for 8 hours the first day and 4 hours the second day. We ended up getting second place because we missed the target by 6 inches. It didnt matter though, because our trebuchet shot the farthest. At the end of the day we loaded it with bricks and shot a 1lb been bag atleas 300 feet down the green. This was the finished project, now beeing displayed in my schools student center.

 

Great post!I love stuff like this!It's not too often you get to see a flamed catapult.Don't get me started on beer can mortars and such........

 

Sweet Treb!

Me and 3 other guys built one in last year (2nd year design project), but we were only allowed to use popsicle sticks and glue, had to throw a squash ball and the pivot was only allowed to be 1m off the ground. We couldn't use the flooting arm design; had to be fixed pivot.

It shot the ball around 20m.


I would like to hear more about these beer can mortars.

 

thanks alot, yeha next year we're trying to get them to let us make ballistas

 

surprised noone mentioned punkin' chukin'

 

last year I took my kids to the local pumpkin patch where the dude had a catapault set up and was launching pumpkins, he was totally ****faced, it was pretty entertaining...

 

You beat me to mentioning it. I first heard about punkin' chukin' maybe 15 years ago in an old industrial magazine, Air Compressor, published by Ingersoll-Rand. It seems the punkin' chukin' people used air cannons as well and needed the big portable I-R construction-type compressors to get enough air at high enough pressures to chuk their punkin's. They still hold the chukin' festival in Delaware. I've seen a website, but I don't have the URL anymore. Where's Google? Here I go.

 

URL for the Punkin Chunkin:

http://www.punkinchunkin.com/main.htm

Enjoy! If you're close enough this is supposed to be fun.

 

We talked about it a year or so ago. Someone posted a link where a guy shot a pumpkin through the midsection of a mid 80's Caprice.

Pretty wicked stuff.

 

Great job. Now we need an engineer to calculate how big an arm we'd need to throw the cracked engine block and other **** lying around in the yard into someone else's yard three blocks away.

 

We have a GE minigun for fun in my office. I didn't build it, and we don't use it on RX7s.

 

Here I was all ready for weapons like I build.

 

Treb's are fun! Built a little one with my teenage son a couple of years ago, 1x2 lumber, 30 inches tall (had to throw 'an item' 3 meters to get a p***ing grade, throw 3 times in succession, two had to be within .5 meters to get an 'A', no problema!)

I want to build a bigger one now, have all the parts for an 8 footer, just no time.

 

Hmmm, I have 13 acres to play with?

 

I saw a Do***entary on PBS about an international contest in the UK and was fastenated.
Seems the best range is gained by letting the moving parts move while swinging, either with the wheels in this "modern" desig or by having the weight on a pendulum or the whole caraige on wheels.
I found this site a while back and it tells a lot about the "sport".

( My Dad told me he and another kid built a catapult and bombarded the Tyler Texas City Hall with Persimmons...But since they were the only "bad kids" around they got caught and got to re whitewash the attacked side of the building...No I don't know if it was really true or like waking 5 miles to school in the snow..

 

I've been thinking that for a long time. I have a douche bag neighbor that keeps calling zoning about my cars and the cops about anything else.
****in' ****...!

I'm thinking about building one of these and launching broken gl***, dead animals, rotten fish, ***** matter, and any other putrid ***** I can find, into her yard.
I think I'll camo mine... instead of flaming it, though....

Thanks for the tech...
... and, not only that, but all those lost nails, right by the bike rack, gives me even more ideas...


JOE

 

Hard to imagine the dallas to rapid cruise, especially with an 8 foot trebuchet aboard

Plus, I hope to have somewhere near that amount myself in the not too distant future (couple of years, anyway)

thx for the offer though

 

I saw a special on TV where they built a treb and actually flung boulders at a wall built to specs of some ancient castle to "prove" if a successful seige could be conducted. It did and they did. It was a cool show. Also saw the one mentioned earlier. History channel, TLC, etc. are cool. I watch them a lot. Recently watched Mythbusters where they tested the giant wrist rocket myth. They used surgical rubber between two uprights of a h.s. football goalpost. They were only able to propel the dummy (forgot his name) about 50 yards. The myth was; illegal aliens were getting across our borders using one of those things at night and hitting a spot the size of a mattress! They busted it.....

 

google backyard ballistics and you will see some interesting stuff.

riverrat

 

Depends, what material are we using for the arm? Do you want it to go more to al***udinal trajectory or direct?

I'm thinking nix the treb for the engine blocks, and go for the giant crossbow. Those things can haul a 400 pound chunk o' steel, and the ****** thing can be mounted in the back of a shop truck. Traditional rod drive-by.

I can see it now, the HAMB drags take on another day of events. Only its a day of complete medieval mayhem, with punkin's and engine blocks strewn about, free wheeling through the air.

 

praise the lord n p*** the ammo, i'll take an M-4 thankee... them things the real deal or what?

 

launch a tuners ricer over the track, or pelt one with watermellons,,, i'd be down with that

 

WOW, I'm thinking more like midair collisions, like an episode of Top Gear where they do that with trailers.

Cool stuff.

 

How do you aim and adjust the range on the Trebucet? This machine fires a flat trajectory? Like a German 88.


I must have seen the same show about Pumpkin Chuckin'. Some of those cannons were pretty interesting.

Hooligans!

 

I was the structural and design engineer for the largest Trebuchet built, according to Guiness.

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2001-03-29/news/feature2.html

You adjust the range by changing the dead fall weight, and the length of the line that hauls the projectile.

 

Hmmm, school seems to have changed somewhat since my day.

This guy makes some interesting stuff (billet alert)...

Gattling Guns

 

GoKarts, Guitars and Gatling Guns! Finally, One-Stop-Shopping!

 

Marc,

This is just too much information.

Big as Avocados, eh? You can always adopt.

 

I don't like the M-4 for political reasons. Seems Chuck Schumer got them a no compe***ion contract when HK got the M-16 bid. Anyhow, both are built on Pac West lowers, the heavy with an American Spirit Arms kit and the other with a kit from a company in IL that changed its name to something like Model 1. The scope on the target gun is a new model Leatherwood with bullet drop compensator. The launcher on the other is 37 mm instead of 40 and launches flares. But it's made exactly like the M-203. This is another oneolytech in 7.62. You know what my motto is? "Only the paranoid survive."

 

The guys at SRL built a "pitching machine" powered by a 500 caddy motor. It launches 2x4's at 120 mph

http://www.srl.org/machines/pitching/

video with rapid fire;
http://www.srl.org/yard/pitching/