Showing posts with label Floating arm trebuchet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Floating arm trebuchet. Show all posts

Friday, November 27, 2009

design the FAT

Have been Emailing back and fourth with my oldest son about our plans for the floating arm trebuchet. Giving ideas back and fourth. Here is one of his CAD drawings.


Having discussions as to the best height of the track and the distance between the weight and wheels. I wanted to have the wheels start on the track, but given some thought, that would make the mechanical advantage fairly low. With the wheels starting above, and the arm resting on another wheel on the frame, this will make the wheels arrive onto the track on a tangent, rather than slapping right down, it took me some thought and sketches to believe that it would work that way.

Watched the pumpkin chunkin championships last night on the Science Channel. These were great! I will never have the time or money to go to that level, but what the heck, small is good.

We can start doing some work on this in the next few weeks

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Floating arm Trebuchet

This summer I plan on building a floating arm Trebuchet (FAT) for pumpkin chunkin. We ran a contest this fall, and this year I will run it and win it. I have been making sketches and figuring. These are my latest with what I think will work
Seems like it should work, but we will mess around with it and see what happens. I expect many failures before getting it right. It will be fun throwing things around the backyard no matter how bad it turns out.
I will continue posting about this